On Aging

On aging: President Kennedy said, “It is not enough to add years to one's life...one must add life to those years.”

86 year old gymnast Johanna and 94 year old quick-stepper Mathilda, featured in the videos below, are still rockin' into old age with robust health and vigor. They appear to be the exception while the norm, what we have come to accept, is infirmity, debility, and senility.

While we all age, and ultimately die, how we live (to the extent of things we can control), most often, determines how we die. 

It is not as if at age 65 one becomes old and everything falls apart. The reality is that decisions we made in our youth and all along the way, relative to health, either bolstered or undermined our body's genetic potential for optimal health. Sadly, most are making bad decisions and paying for it with serious health issues as they age.

Among many false notions we have about modern medicine is the idea that we are living longer. In terms of absolute life span, nothing has changed. What has changed is the average life expectancy. One thing modern medicine has excelled at is keeping more sick people alive longer; in many cases, longer than they wish. 

“Today's average modern adult spends more than 10 percent of his or her life sick,” spending the last 12 years of life dysfunctionally, with a poor and progressively deteriorating quality of life, waiting to die. Said another way, we are not living longer; we are taking longer to die.

“Half of those ages sixty-five and over have two or more chronic diseases, and a quarter have problems so severe as to limit their ability to perform one or more activities of daily living. Meanwhile, throughout the industrialized world, (more) people are living longer, but they are getting sick sooner. So the number of years they spend chronically ill is actually increasing in both directions.” In other words, while industrialized nations have been successful in decreasing infant mortality, our children are so unhealthy that the onset of disease is much earlier and they will live a larger part of their lives sick. They also have a decreased life expectancy.

It is by no coincidence that all of this translates into expanding profits for both the medical-pharmaceutical-insurance industrial complex and the big Agra and chemical food industries.

Health and vigor into old age are not only possible; they are nature's set-point. We are genetically programmed for health throughout our lives. Johanna and Mathilda should represent the norm.  

The decisions we make throughout our lives, as influenced by our lifetime exposures and experiences (70%), and to a lesser extent genes (30%), will determine how we live into our old age, and how we die.

"Of all the self-fulfilling prophecies in our culture, the assumption that aging means decline and poor health is probably the deadliest.” 

Tribute to Jack LaLanne

My Tribute to Jack LaLanne

Jack LaLanne, ‘the founder of the modern fitness movement,’ died at the age of 96. He was a showman and a salesman. He was passionate in his message, and his message was spot on correct. It was a message of health.

In 1936 Jack LaLanne “opened the prototype for the fitness spas to come — a gym, juice bar and health food store — in an old office building in Oakland. The Jack LaLanne Show made its debut in 1951 as a local program in the San Francisco area, and then went nationwide on daytime television in 1959.”

Had Americans heeded his advice back then, and ignored the advice of their doctors and the AMA, we would have been a much healthier nation and tens of millions of lives would have been spared the devastation and death of the chronic lifestyle degenerative diseases of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity and more.

According to Jack LaLanne, “the doctors were against me — they said that working out with weights would give people heart attacks and they would lose their sex drive.” Oops. What an amazing, glaring, costly (in terms of disease, death and money) and self-serving ignorance of health that turned out to be a financial bonanza for the medical-pharmaceutical-insurance industrial complex.

And this was far from the first, or last, time they have been so wrong. In fact, I refer to it as ‘creating the next generation of users’ (of medical/pharmaceutical care and insurance).

“Back in the 1930’s, the AMA played a role in establishing cigarettes as a popular product. The AMA helped develop, and then accepted in its journal, advertisements that made cigarettes appear to be a physician endorsed product.” In fact, in the 1940’s, cigarette makers regularly used ‘science’ and physicians in their ads to sell cigarettes. “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette,” "cool and soothing to the back of the throat"…fueling the rise of lung disease and death from emphysema and cancer. Oops.

The 1950’s brought the cholesterol scare. The combination of food industry and medical science and doctors began to scare people away from eating natural animal fats in favor of the synthetic trans fats vastly contributing to the rise of obesity, cardiovascular disease, and death over the subsequent decades. Oops.

And now, doctors are scaring people out of the sun in favor of the full-body application of chemical sunscreens for life, creating a pandemic of vitamin D deficiency. “Individuals with low levels of vitamin D appear to have a higher risk of death from all causes, according to a report in the Archives of Internal Medicine.” Oops.

Why is none of this surprising? What would you expect from an industry that focuses on, and profits from, disease and disease care; generating $2.6 trillion dollars in 2006 ($86,000/second), projected to be $4.3 trillion ($136,000/second) by 2017?

Jack LaLanne was a chiropractor. His message was/is the message of chiropractic health; that health is the innate set-point and possible throughout our lives if we safeguard and nurture it with proper exercise and nutrition…a simple, elegant, and irrefutable message. Why is it so hard for people to believe?

Worth watching. As they say, it harks back to a more innocent time.