3 Apps That Encourage Healthy Eating

Tag: nutrition (Page 1 of 2)

3 Apps That Encourage Healthy Eating

On May 10, 2017

In Dr. Jenson Mak, Healthy Ageing, Healthy Bodies

Maintaining a healthy diet has become much more challenging with fast food restaurants opening on every corner and people sharing their culinary creations on social media. Though certain occasions in life call for some indulging, eating healthy as often and for as long in life as possible holds the key to aging gracefully. With the rapid advancements, technology provides in everyday life, finding the best recipes to stay in as great of shape possible is always in the palm of your hand. Here are a few great apps to help manage a balanced diet.

Harvest

Not sure if this is the right time of year for blueberries? This user-friendly app is great for anyone who is a fan of fresh produce. The app’s simple design shows exactly which fruits and veggies are “in-season” and which time of year consumers are likely to find the freshest produce. Not only does it give projections for the fruit’s season, but it also shows users how to determine the perfect ripeness. Fresh food lovers, rejoice as Harvest has provided the handbook in perfecting the ideal summer fruit salad.

Fooducate

Everyone is somewhat familiar with the meanings of nutrition labels, but truly understanding the calories is where many fall short. This clever app will share the genuine nutritional value of the foods being consumed. It even offers healthier substitutions when a user inputs a junkier food item. The Fooducate app alerts users of potentially harmful ingredients that would cause fluctuation in their attempt to eat better.

HelloFresh

With the hectic lifestyles led by many, finding time to make it to the grocery store in order to get ingredients for a specific meal becomes a difficult task. The people over at HelloFresh came up with the brilliant idea to deliver exact measurements of ingredients to make homemade meals feel like a breeze. Every meal comes with holistic nutritional information, easily transferable to a calorie counter. The app allows customers to see which meals they can expect to receive in each shipment along with detailed recipe instructions and additional uses for any unique ingredients included.

The food industry has made it very easy for individuals to lose track of the calories included in everything they consume. Luckily technology has made so many advancements and allows us to obtain nutritious options and guidelines instantaneously. When utilizing such tools, becoming healthy will become an easily achievable lifestyle transition for anyone!

Top 5 Healthy Food Substitutions

By Jenson Mak

On March 30, 2017

In Dr. Jenson Mak, Healthy Ageing, Healthy Bodies, Vitality

It’s never too late (or too early) to start adjusting your diet towards becoming healthier for the sake of your body. If you typically don’t spend your time experimenting with foods in the kitchen, then you won’t know about the healthy substitutes that you can use in your cooking. By substituting these simple, everyday foods, for ingredients that typically make your meals unhealthy, you can enjoy all the foods you love while contributing to the overall health of your body, and longevity of life!

Black Beans

When thinking about luscious cakes, brownies, and sweet treats, black beans are the last thing that would come to mind, right? However, if you’re looking to cut calories and carbs, while still enjoying your sweet desserts, black beans are the way to go. The legumes are considered one of the healthiest foods for your body, as they are packed with protein and fiber. Substituting black beans for flour in your baking dishes will allow you to maximize your nutrition without noticing a taste difference. Wherever a recipe calls for a cup of flour, use a cup of black beans, well drained and mashed.

Olive Oil

The ever so popular mediterranean diet has caused many to switch their diets for optimal health, and olive oil plays a key part. Olives are one of the oldest food sources known to mankind, including one of the healthiest. Olives are filled with OMega-3 fatty acids that your body needs to function properly. Instead of using the typical vegetable oil, opt it for olive oil. It is also great for making dressings or cooking dishes (although its health benefits are optimized when unheated).

Greek Yogurt

You’ve heard about the health craze all over. Greek yogurt is not going anywhere thanks to its high nutritional benefits. Greek yogurt is packed with high protein, and less sugar, sodium, and fat compared to regular yogurt. Greek yogurt is also great for substitutes. Instead of using mayo or sour cream in your daily cooking, plain greek yogurt will make your meals much more nutritious without a taste difference. It’s also great for making dressings, desserts, and baking because of its thick and creamy texture.

Wine

Wine is also considered part of the mediterranean diet. Known as the Drink of the Gods, the ancient drink comes with more health benefits than any other alcoholic drink out there. For one, many studies have shown that wine can play a role in preventing depression and anti-aging due to the high amount of antioxidants made with the drink (with moderate consumption). It’s also a great drink to sip when out at the bar with friends or relaxing at home, as wine is significantly lower in calories compared to sugary and sweet cocktails.

Applesauce, Dates & Cinnamon

There’s nothing evil about sugar, spice, and everything nice in those beautiful iced cupcakes and luscious chocolate cakes, right? Wrong. Many experts have found that sugar can actually become as addictive to humans as some drugs. Sugar is responsible for obesity, diabetes, and heart diseases, as it converts to fat in our bodies. The new guidelines show that men and women should not consume more than 6-9 teaspoons of sugar per day. The key is to stay away from as much added sugar as you can, however, it is still possible to enjoy sweet treats. One old fashioned trick is to substitute applesauce in recipes that call for sugar. This also allows your item to become more moist. Another trick is to add dates to recipes that call for sugar. Dates are naturally sweet, so you won’t notice the taste difference. Cinnamon is also a great spice to substitute sugar for. Recent studies have found that cinnamon has amazing health benefits that could positively impact your health. Try adding cinnamon to your coffee or oatmeal instead of sugar!

The Best Health Apps 2017

By Jenson Mak

On March 29, 2017

In Dr. Jenson Mak, Healthy Ageing, Healthy Bodies, Healthy Minds, Vitality

As technology and education continues to revolutionize and empower human beings, there is no better time to focus on your personal health and fitness than now. The ease and flexibility of having a fitness app on your phone allows you more time and motivation to workout throughout the day and keep up with your health. Here are the top health apps you should have on your phone for optimal daily motivation.

Workout Trainer

This app is great for those looking to stay active throughout the day. If you get bored of the same, boring routine, then this app is for you. Workout trainer provides you with hundreds of workouts from strength training, to cardio, to yoga and relaxation. You get to pick what type of workout you’re feeling that day and which muscles you want to strengthen. This app will ensure that you’re staying physically active throughout the day with many different options for you to choose from. This is a great app to switch up your routine, while keeping track of your daily activity.

Yoga Studio

If you’re tired of driving back and forth to the yoga studio every morning, while traffic is far from allowing you to destress. Yoga Studio is the app for you. First of all, yoga should be relaxing, and there is nothing relaxing about paying a costly monthly fee for joining yoga studios each month. Yoga studio is a great app to use throughout your day. All you need is a relaxing, quiet space to turn your home into the same comfort as a yoga studio. The app offers a variety of virtual yoga classes from beginner to advanced practices. Save time and money by implementing this app into your lifestyle, and be on the road to a relaxing and stress free daily routine.

My Fitness Pal

Part of living a healthy lifestyle through diet and exercise is planning out and monitoring your daily activity and the foods you eat. My Fitness Pal is a great app for those on the go. The app allows you to scan or enter in details about any foods you eat throughout the day. It also allows you to enter in your daily physical activity, which can be linked to other apps in your phone. The app will keep track of the nutrition of your daily foods, such as calories, carbs, sodium, etc, while tracking your physical activity. You can also set goals such as weight loss, and the app will help you with a target of calories to intake daily, and exercises to practice throughout the day.

Sleep Cycle

One of the biggest aspects of living a healthy lifestyle is getting a good night’s sleep. Sleep Cycle is a great app to keep track of your sleeping. It works through a motion sensor in your phone and a microphone which is able to be heard when you move around in your sleep. It also has an alarm feature that will softly wake you up, allowing you to train your body to go to sleep and wake up at a consistent routine time. The key to your daily productivity is sleep, therefore this app will allow you to start the day right.

How Nutrition Impacts Age

By Jenson Mak

On February 15, 2017

In Dr. Jenson Mak, Healthy Ageing, Healthy Bodies, Vitality

A new study – Nutritional Considerations for Health Aging and Reduction in Age-Related Chronic Diseases – featured in Advances in Nutrition found that improving nutritional education within the healthcare system may promote healthier aging and reduce the financial burden of the aging population.

It is estimated that by the year 2050, almost 400 million people will be 80 years or older. This estimate is almost three times higher than in 2013. According to the published report, a growing number of this population will be susceptible to a concept known as nutritional frailty – a condition in older adults involving the sudden loss of weight and strength that increases the chance of experiencing disability. The growing number of obese older adults is also vulnerable to nutritional frailty and its associated diseases such as sarcopenia, mental decline, and infectious diseases.

The study determined that a specific model describing the various factors that influence food choices needs to be established to increase the understanding behind older adults and their food intake and meal quality. Recently, a new model was designed to monitor food intake in older adults in addition to the inclusion of randomised clinical studies. This model will help determine the specific nutritional requirements and biomarkers needed to further understand the impact of increasing age on areas such as necessary protein intake and muscle turnover. The study’s finding will also help establish new BMI guidelines tailored to the aging population.

According to Gilles Bergeron, the executive director at The Sackler Institute for Nutrition Science at the New York Academy of Sciences, “A nutritional assessment model that takes into consideration the effect of aging on muscle mass, weight loss and nutrient absorption is crucial to overall wellness in our elderly population,”. He continues, “However, nutrition recommendations are usually based on that of a typical healthy adult, and fail to consider the effect of aging on muscle mass, weight loss, and nutrient absorption and utilisation..”
Simin Nikbin Meydani, director of the Nutritional Immunology Laboratory at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, agrees with Bergeron’s views on the need for personalised nutrition recommendations stating, “much greater emphasis needs to be placed on prioritising research that will fill the knowledge gaps and provide the kind of data needed by health and nutrition experts if we’re going to address this problem,”. She adds, “There also needs to be more education about on-going nutritional needs for those involved with elder-care — not only in a clinical setting, but also for family members who are responsible for aging adults.”

Simin Nikbin Meydani, director of the Nutritional Immunology Laboratory at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, agrees with Bergeron’s views on the need for personalized nutrition recommendations stating, “much greater emphasis needs to be placed on prioritizing research that will fill the knowledge gaps and provide the kind of data needed by health and nutrition experts if we’re going to address this problem,”. She adds, “There also needs to be more education about on-going nutritional needs for those involved with elder-care — not only in a clinical setting, but also for family members who are responsible for aging adults.”

Seniors & Exercise, How Long, How Often, How Much?

By Jenson Mak

On November 16, 2016

In Dr. Jenson Mak, Healthy Ageing, Healthy Bodies, Healthy Minds, Vitality

We all know that fitness is one of the major keys to staying active, healthy, happy, and full of vitality as you age. But seniors also need to take into account that injury from overexertion or exercise too strenuous can lead to serious complications or much longer healing times as you age.

A large health study suggests that the elderly can benefit from as little as 15 minutes per day of moderately heart-pumping exercise. (Though 30 minutes minimum is recommended.) An active fitness routine can help everything from balance and strength, to delaying the onset of heart disease and dementia. It can reduce depression, prevent diabetes, delay or prevent osteoporosis, and reduce occurrences of breast and colon cancer.

So what kind of exercise should you do? For how long? And how often?

There are three main types of exercise, aerobic/endurance-building, weight training, and stretching.

Endurance building exercises are activities like walking, swimming, dancing, or anything else that gets your heart rate up and increases circulation falls into this category. This includes chores like shovelling snow, walking the dog, raking leaves, or mowing the lawn, as long as you do it at a pace that gets your heart pumping! Increased activity that ups your heart-rate is the number one most important element for mood, weight, and cardiac benefits.

Weight training doesn’t need to mean lifting weights like a bodybuilder, although lifting weights is really good for muscle health and can counteract the muscle loss that comes along with old age. It also ups your metabolism, which helps keep your weight and blood sugar in check! Physical labour chores can be part of a weight-building regimen, as can exercise that uses your own body-weight, like push-ups, lunges, arm-circles, and sit-ups. Yoga and pilates are great ways to incorporate muscle-building into your routine.

Stretching exercises help maintain flexibility, increase balance, and help prevent injury. It’s important to include stretching with any exercise you do, because it helps prevent you from over-exerting muscles during exercise. They can also help with old injuries, back pain, headaches, and other recurring symptoms. Stretching will keep you active, reduce tension, and keep your mobility at it’s peak!

The length of time you devote to fitness daily will depend -at first- on your current fitness level. For moderate activity (working hard enough that it’s difficult to talk, but not so hard that it’s impossible), the ideal is a 30 minute workout. But consistency is more important than overworking yourself, so if you haven’t been very active until now, you might want to build up to 30 minutes over time, start with as little as 5 minutes, if you need too. Listen to your body!

A large health study in Taiwan followed about 416,000 people for an average of eight years and discovered that people who exercised just 15 minutes a day reduced their mortality from all causes by 14 per cent and increased their life expectancy by three years.

The frequency of exercise is your key to seeing long-term health benefits, so you should be trying to get some activity into your routine every day, or nearly every day. Consistency is the key to building stamina, muscle, and seeing those great health benefits.

At least twice a week your schedule should include muscle-building, and every other day should include aerobic activity. Stretching is best if it happens as part of your cool-down after working out, or first thing every morning. If 30 minutes every day doesn’t fit into your schedule, you can try dividing your time up differently, such as doing an hour and fourty-five minutes of activity every Saturday and Sunday and none during the week. Also keep in mind that 30 minutes a day can happen in three 10-minute installments, or two 15-minute sessions, if you’re busy or worried about overworking yourself.

However you set your goals, make sure you can accomplish them, and remember to always take a break if you need one! A few days off every week to relax and recuperate is better than doing damage by pushing too hard, and it’s also better than setting yourself goals that you won’t follow through on. Any activity is better than none!

Vigorous exercise carries risks that people should discuss with a doctor. You should always check with your doctor before starting a new exercise programme, especially if you have any of the following risk factors:

A symptom you have never told your doctor about
Arthritis of the hips or knees
Blood clots
Chest pain
Chronic lung disease
Diabetes
Eye injury or recent eye surgery
Family history of a cardiovascular disease
Foot or ankle sores that won’t heal
Heart disease
Heart palpitations
Hernia
High blood pressure
History of smoking
Infections
Joint swelling
Obesity
Pain or trouble walking after a fall
Shortness of breath

How to Travel for Business Without Getting Exhausted

By Jenson Mak

On November 9, 2016

In Dr. Jenson Mak, Healthy Ageing, Healthy Bodies, Healthy Minds, Vitality

Exhaustion, stress, and lack of sleep increase the effects of aging. For those who travel professionally, these are exactly the obstacles you routinely face. You need to be sure that you have taken some steps to travel without getting worn out every time you go somewhere. Travelling can be hard on you, but there is no reason to make it even harder. Anyone who does international travel, business travel or local travel should follow these tips so that they can get where they need to go without feeling like they are falling apart.

The first step is making sure that you are ready to go on every trip. It makes more sense to get yourself ready in advance so that you can travel. Do not pack at the last minute and expect everything to go the way that it should go. You have to be ready long before the trip, and you need to walk out the door knowing you have everything. If you travel for work frequently, consider making a standard travel checklist and using it every time as a packing guide.

Stop checking bags. It costs money, wastes time, and lengthens your trip. You want to get on and off the plane without any problem, and you want to have everything on your person the whole time, so you never worry about important clothing, documents, or equipment getting lost. Extra luggage is very hard to deal with, not just in the airport, but the hotel, taxis, or subways/buses will all mean wrangling luggage, and it will feel like you have no time on your trips because you spend it all dealing with luggage. Not to mention the time saved in packing and unpacking!

Sleep is vital for international and business travellers. Jet lag will always find you, but sleeping on planes will help keep the side-effects down. Make sure you are comfortable on your trips. International travel, business travel, and any other kind of travel has to be comfortable in order to relax or rest. Bring a pillow you really like, or try to get the right weight blanket that will help you stay warm in the conditioned air or planes and trains without overheating you. Anything that makes you more comfortable will be a good step in the right direction. Look up your plane model to help decide seating that will give you the space/location you prefer. Does noise bother you? Invest in earplugs or noise cancelling headphones. If you aren’t comfortable, you’ll either sleep lightly and get no rest, or never be able to relax at all.

Plan for unexpected things to happen on your trip. You need to be ready to adjust mentally when you get to places to do your work, and you need to be ready for anything to fail at any time. It could be a flight getting cancelled, or it could be technical failure in the conference room you are presenting in. There are just so many things that could go wrong when you are out of town, it’s a good idea to be in the mindset, and to have backup plans in place. Assuming your trip will be perfect is a recipe for stress, rather than productivity.

Travelling can be exhausting, and if you do it often it can get lonely. Staying in touch with people you care about can make travel much easier. Having someone to talk to goes a long way, and it will help you make sure that you have some place to vent when things do not go well. You can relax a lot more when you have a personal connection, and feel more at home. This person could be friend, family, co-worker, or even a friend online that travels for work as well. This method helps you keep from feeling like you life has been turned upside down every time you travel.

Not Just Living Longer, But Better, with Diabetes Management

By Jenson Mak

On September 13, 2016

In Dr. Jenson Mak, Healthy Ageing, Healthy Bodies, Vitality

Intensive management of type II diabetes may make a huge difference on how long, as well as how well, you will live, according to this study. Even if you failed to manage your diabetes until beyond middle age, beginning management now could have a dramatic impact on your longevity and quality of life with the disease, the research reports.

People who were at risk of complications associated with type II diabetes were selected randomly. They either pursued their usual treatment or were put in a group treated with multi-pronged and aggressive treatment programme. Two decades after the start of the research, the scientists have discovered that people involved in an aggressive treatment team lived nearly 8 years longer. Additionally, they lived much better and their risk of kidney disease, heart disease, and blindness dropped significantly. The only complication which does not improve is nerve damage triggered by diabetes, which is permanent.

Early and intensified intervention of patients diagnosed with type II diabetes, treated with microalbuminuria, together with a target driven pharmacological medicine regime and some behavioural actions are the course of treatments that showed the results of a lengthened life span. Not only that, but the additional lifespan will be relatively free from serious or feared complications. It was confirmed by Dr. Oluf Pedersen, who specialises in endocrinology and internal medicine at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Centre for Basic Metabolic Research at the University of Copenhagen, which is situated in Denmark.

Microalbuminuria is the term pertaining to an amount of protein in your urine. Protein in the urine is a sign which means the kidneys are not working properly, and it is also the initial symptom of diabetic kidney injury according to ADA or American Diabetes Association.

Somebody with this condition is likely to develop some other complications associated with diabetes since it’s the marker for general blood vessel damage, as explained by Pedersen. Their average age was around 55 at the beginning of the research, which started in 1993. Everyone was overweight, bordering on obesity, according to the data that was collected at the outset of the study. Pedersen mentioned that the objective of intensive treatment is to resolve all changeable risk factors for early death and complications. Such factors involve blood sugar, cholesterol, blood pressure and triglycerides as well as the danger of blood clots.

If appropriate, medicines like cholesterol-lowering statin or drugs for hypertension were prescribed. Behaviour modification was a crucial aspect of intensive treatment. The study volunteers are instructed on making exercise and healthy diet changes. They were given help in order to stop smoking. The patients were cured at Steno Diabetes Centre located in Copenhagen for nearly 8 years. They were consistently motivated and educated, according to the staff. All of this motivation, clearly, has been paid off.

The blood pressure of the patients dropped. Their good cholesterol level went up, while the bad ones -as well as the triglycerides- also dropped. After more than twenty years, 38 of the people who participated in the group that underwent intensive treatment died, versus the 55 people who were in the traditional treatment group. Aside from longer survival, this intensive group got an average 8-year delay with the onset of heart disease and stroke.

The benefits were so clear following the ending of the intensive treatment that both of the two groups, the intensive and traditional treatment alike, got the chance to continue the intensive treatment if they wanted to!

Dr. Joel Zonszein is director of the Clinical Diabetes Centre at Montefiore Medical Centre in New York City. “These results are impressive, and the message is important. Physicians are not being aggressive enough, and aren’t treating to targets at the beginning,” he said. “If you look at all the factors they (the Danish researchers) treated, about 80 per cent of the U.S. population isn’t treated correctly, according to national surveys,” said Zonszein, who wasn’t involved with the study.

Consortium Uses Tiny Worms To Screen For Anti-Aging Chemicals

By Jenson Mak

On August 30, 2016

In Dr. Jenson Mak, Healthy Ageing, Healthy Bodies, Healthy Minds

There is currently a large need for pharmaceuticals that can combat age-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and Huntington’s disease. Doctors at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging are trying to fill this niche. The team is working to identify chemicals that can improve lifespan in a number of organisms. These chemicals may one day become incorporated in an anti-aging drug in the future.

The Buck Institute’s researchers are working with teams led by Monica Driscoll, Ph.D. at Rutgers University, and Patrick Phillip, Ph.D., at the University of Oregon. The team is working together in the Caenorhabditis Intervention Testing Programme (CITP), a consortium funded by the National Institute on Aging. Researchers in the consortium are using a number of strains and species of the roundworm Caenorhabditis to find chemical agents that can delay aging effects across a number of organisms with varied genetic backgrounds.

The processes associated with aging are very complex and are most likely informed by an individual’s genes. CITP hopes that if scientists can detect agents that show effects in a variety of organisms with different genetic backgrounds, those agents may have a high likelihood of being effective in humans, too. Roundworms are ideal for screening chemicals affecting lifespan in a short amount of time because they only live about three weeks.

Researchers at the Buck Institute used three stains each of the roundworms C. briggsae and C. elegans in order to test a series of ten compounds that have shown increased longevity in other organisms such as C. elegans. Most of the chemicals that had been previously studied were shown to extend lifespan in the laboratory-adapted N2 strain of C. elegans. The researchers did not yet know how these chemicals would behave in wild strains of C. elegans or C. briggsae.

The research showed that a number of the compounds did increase longevity in the C. elegans strains, while others only showed these effects in the N2 C. elegans strain. However, the compound Thioflavin T lengthened lifespan in every organism tested. It was also extremely potent, with at least one of the strains consistently showing a doubling of lifespan.

Thioflavin T is a dye that is commonly used in laboratories. It binds to toxic protein aggregates called amyloid plaques. These plaques are found in the brains of people who have Alzheimer’s disease. Buck Institute researchers had previously published results stating that the lifespan of one strain of C. elegans could be extended by Thioflavin T. The study also stated that Thioflavin T is likely to work by allowing the organisms to maintain proper transport, folding, expression, and clearance of proteins.

The CITP has created a stronger scientific process by bringing together multiple institutions and allowing these researchers to validate each other’s work. The Buck Institute team recently analysed the results as a whole and found the the three CITP study sites did a good job of reproducing each other’s data. However, analysis of the individual experiments at any given site shows that there is high variation from experiment to experiment. The experiments still need to be replicated in a large variety of organisms to ensure the anti-aging effects of these chemicals.

According to lead author Mark Lucanic, Ph.D., the researchers hope that the chemicals that have promising effects can be tested in vertebrates in the future. If the chemicals are effective in vertebrates, they may be the basis of drugs that can combat age-related illnesses in humans. This could be a huge step for anti-aging and the prevention of diseases associated with aging.

Pomegranates Anti-Ageing Capabilities

By Jenson Mak

On July 13, 2016

In Dr. Jenson Mak, Healthy Ageing, Healthy Bodies, Healthy Minds, Vitality

Pomegranates have long been touted as an elixir of anti-aging, but there has been very little research that proves those claims, outside of the rich amounts of antioxidants contain. Until now, that is.

Research shows that there is a compound within pomegranates that is activated by gut bacteria. The effect of our intestinal microbes breaking down this compound results in a by-product called Urolithin A, which has been shown in research to aid muscles in protecting themselves against aging. When Urolithin A was given to Caenorhabiditis elegans worms, they lived an average lifespan that was 45% longer than the lifespan of the regular worms. When fed to elderly mice, the mice could run up to 42% further, without building any additional muscle. This change suggests that the chemical improves muscle-cell quality, not quantity.

The human trials have begun, but the findings from the worms and mice were so measurable and impressive the preliminary results have been published in Nature Medicine.

Mitochondria in our cells work kind of like batteries, powering the cells. Eventually, mitochondria degredate and fail over time, which leads to complications like muscle weakness and Parkinson’s disease. Essentially, Urolithin A (UA for short) is responsible for re-charging failing mitochondria, salvaging cells which might otherwise fail completely. “It’s the only known molecule that can relaunch the mitochondrial clean-up process, otherwise known as mitophagy,” said Patrick Aebischer, co-author on the study.

But before you run out to stock up on pomegranates, remember that the fruit don’t carry the compound, rather your gut bacteria processing it. There are those out there that do not have the right intestinal microbes for this process, or some that produce far less of the compound than others do.

The co-authors of this study founded a company to help combat this problem with a goal of creating and administering precise doses of UA to bodies directly, without the variable conversion process in the digestive system. They have already begun testing with humans in clinical trials in hospitals throughout Europe.

And for those of you that are reluctant to believe that worms and rats are good test subjects for humans, fear not: “Species that are evolutionarily quite distant, such as C elegans and the rat, react to the same substance in the same way. That’s a good indication that we’re touching here on an essential mechanism in living organisms.” So says Johan Auwerx.
The idea is to see if UA can provide the same mitochondrial-saving benefits to humans that it did in the trials. If it does, we could see UA being given to the elderly to help with muscular degeneration, amongst other ailments related to age. We may not see 45% longer lives, as we did with the rats, but we may see an extension of quality of life, and a longer period of healthy lifespans.

Despite Prevelance, Osteoporosis Isn’t Normal

By Jenson Mak

On June 8, 2016

In Dr. Jenson Mak, Healthy Ageing, Healthy Bodies, Vitality

Just as with heart disease, many people assume that osteoporosis will occur as a normal part of aging. However, just as there is nothing natural or normal about having a heart attack, it is not natural to fracture a wrist from an accident, or breaking a hip from slipping. Neither is your spine collapsing or bending, becoming painful, rounded, and humped. Bone is a living, growing tissue that can repair itself, and is vital to the body, supporting you and protecting our soft inner organs from injury. Built to be both strong and flexible, bones are supposed to grow and change with our bodies.

Osteoporosis means “porous bones”, and is a disease that occurs when the body loses too much calcium, fails to make enough new bone tissue, or produces too little bone. This causes bones to become weak and makes breaks more likely, as well as hunched backs with age. But this is not a normal part of the aging process, it means something is wrong with your body.

Often, osteoporosis is one of the greatest obstacles to ageing healthily, and with vitality. According to the US National Osteoporosis Foundation, an estimated 54 million U.S adults are at risk for osteoporosis and low bone mass. The story is the same in many countries. More than half of the adult population over age 50 is at risk of breaking a bone and should be concerned about bone health. For young people, proper nutrition and physical activity are critical to reaching peak bone mass and preventing broken bones later in life. According to the International Osteoporosis Foundation, your doctor can evaluate you to determine if you need a bone density test. The IOF has a one-minute online osteoporosis test you can take and then bring the results to your next doctor’s appointment to discuss.

From DrWeil.com: There are actually two different types of bone – both of which lose bone mass later in life, but at different times.

Trabecular bone refers to the inner portion of bone that contains calcium in lattice crystal-like structures. The years that comprise childhood through young adulthood are critical for depositing calcium in trabecular bone, which then provides a reserve of this mineral in later life. Trabecular bone is sensitive to several hormones, including oestrogen, which control the amount of calcium deposited and withdrawn. The calcium in trabecular bone is used by the body when blood calcium levels are low. After age 30, a gradual loss in trabecular bone begins to occur.
Cortical bone is the dense layer that forms the outer shell of bone. While Both types of bone are crucial to bone strength and both contain calcium, cortical bone does not give up its reserves as readily as trabecular bone, and does not begins to decline in mass until after about age 40.

You can discover and treat osteoporosis before you break a bone or develop a fracture. There is medication, as well as diet and exercise regimens that you can undertake to prevent or treat osteoporosis, which will allow you freedom and mobility as you age.

Weight-bearing exercise builds bone, and can delay or slow bone loss with age. Vitamin D is vital to bone health, as is calcium, and vitamin K is important as well. Cortisol, the hormone most associated with chronic stress, is detrimental to bone health and can take a toll over long periods of time, so make sure to take some time out for yourself, to calm and centre. Yoga has benefits in both the weight-bearing exercise category as well as the stress-relief category and is an excellent place to start.

The earlier you start these habits, the longer your bones will remain strong and healthy, but also remember, it’s never too late to start!

Jenson Mak | Vitality & Healthy Ageing Blog

Dr. Jenson Mak covers the best of living a vital and healthy life at any age.

Tag: nutrition (Page 1 of 2)