Falling: Is It Due To Age Or Health Issues?

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Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Falling is something the risk of which increases with age, both in probability and in severity of consequences

  • Today’s main feature looks at what factors are and aren’t age-related, and how we can minimize most of them at any age

• Have you tried everything for sleep and still find yourself getting to sleep later than you’d like, and/or sleeping less soundly than you’d like?

  • Today’s sponsor Cornbread Hemp is offering 30% of their gummies that combine organic CBD with lavender, valerian, and chamomile, for a synergistic soporific effect that’ll have you peacefully snoozing in no time, guaranteed (literally, they offer a guarantee).

• Today’s featured recipe is for muhammara, a versatile Levantine dish that’s as nutritionally dense as it is tasty!

Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive

A Word To The Wise

Watch and Learn

10 Tips To Reduce Morning Pain & Stiffness With Arthritis

Physiotherapist and osteoarthritis specialist Dr. Alyssa Kuhn has professional advice:

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Q&A Thursday

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

So, no question/request too big or small 😎

❝What are the signs that a senior is falling due to health issues rather than just aging?❞

Superficial answer: having an ear infection can result in a loss of balance, and is not particularly tied to age as a risk factor

More useful answer: first, let’s consider these two true statements:

• The risks of falling (both the probability and the severity of consequences) increase with age

• Health issues (in general) tend to increase with age

With this in mind, it’s difficult to disconnect the two, as neither exist in a vacuum, and each is strongly associated with the other.

So the question is easier to answer by first flipping it, to ask:

❝What are the health issues that typically increase with age, that increase the chances of falling?❞

A non-exhaustive list includes:

• Loss of strength due to sarcopenia (reduced muscle mass)

• Loss of mobility due to increased stiffness (many causes, most of which worsen with age)

• Loss of risk-awareness due to diminished senses (for example, not seeing an obstacle until too late)

• Loss of risk-awareness due to reduced mental focus (cognitive decline producing absent-mindedness)

Note that in the last example there, and to a lesser extent the third one, reminds us that falls also often do not happen in a vacuum. There is (despite how it may sometimes feel!) no actual change in our physical relationship with gravity as we get older; most falls are about falling over things, even if it’s just one’s own feet:

The 4 Bad Habits That Cause The Most Falls While Walking

Disclaimer: sometimes a person may just fall down for no external reason. An example of why this may happen is if a person’s joint (for example an ankle or a knee) has a particular weakness that means it’ll occasionally just buckle and collapse under one’s own weight. This doesn’t even have to be a lot of weight! The weakness could be due to an old injury, or Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (with its characteristic joint hypermobility symptoms), or something else entirely.

Now, notice how:

• all of these things can happen at any age

• all of these things are more likely to happen the older we get

• none of these things have to happen at any age

That last one’s important to remember! Aging is often viewed as an implacable Behemoth, but the truth is that it is many-faceted and every single one of those facets can be countered, to a greater or lesser degree.

Think of a room full of 80-year-olds, and now imagine that…

• One has the hearing of a 20-year-old

• One has the eyesight of a 20-year-old

• One has the sharp quick mind of a 20-year-old

• One has the cardiovascular fitness of a 20-year-old

…etc. Now, none of those things in isolation is unthinkable, so remember, there is no magic law of the universe saying we can’t have each of them:

Age & Aging: What Can (And Can’t) We Do About It?

Which means: that goes for the things that increase the risk of falling, too. In other words, we can combat sarcopenia with protein and resistance training, maintain our mobility, look after our sensory organs as best we can, nourish our brain and keep it sharp, etc etc etc:

Train For The Event Of Your Life! (Mobility As A Long-Term "Athletic" Goal For Personal Safety)

Which doesn’t mean: that we will necessarily succeed in all areas. Your writer here, broadly in excellent health, and whose lower body is still a veritable powerhouse in athletic terms, has a right ankle and left knee that will sometimes just buckle (yay, the aforementioned hypermobility).

So, it becomes a priority to pre-empt the consequences of that, for example:

• being able to fall with minimal impact (this is a matter of knowing how, and can be learned from “soft” martial arts such as aikido), and

• ensuring the skeleton can take a knock if necessary (keeping a good balance of vitamins, minerals, protein, etc; keeping an eye on bone density).

See also:

Fall Special ← appropriate for the coming season, but it’s about avoiding falling, and reducing the damage of falling if one does fall, including some exercises to try at home.

Take care!

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Recipes Worth Sharing

Muhammara

This is a Levantine dish, Syrian in origin (although Lebanese cuisine uses it plenty too) and popularly enjoyed all the way up to Turkey, down to Egypt, and across to Armenia. And today, perhaps rather further afield! It’s first and foremost a spicy dip/spread, though it can be lengthened into a sauce, and/or made more substantial by adding an extra protein. We’ll give you the basic recipe though, and let you see where it takes you!

Healthwise, it’s very nutritionally dense, mostly thanks to the walnuts and red peppers, though spices and olive oil bring their healthy benefits too.

Click below for our full recipe, and learn its secrets:

One-Minute Book Review

Flexible Dieting: A Science-Based, Reality-Tested Method for Achieving and Maintaining Your Optima l Physique, Performance & Health – by Alan Aragon

This is the book from which we were working, for the most part, in our recent Expert Insights feature with Alan Aragon. We’ll re-iterate here: despite not being a Dr. Aragon, he’s a well-published research scientist with decades in the field of nutritional science, as well as being a personal trainer and fitness educator.

As you may gather from our other article, there’s a lot more to this book than “eat what you like”. Specifically, as the title suggests, there’s a lot of science—decades of it, and while we had room to cite a few studies in our article, he cites many many more; several citations per page of a 288-page book.

So, that sets the book apart from a lot of its genre; instead of just “here’s what some gym-bro thinks”, it’s “here’s what decades of data says”.

Another strength of this book is how clearly he explains such a lot of science—he explains terms as they come up, as well as having a generous glossary. He also explains things clearly and simply without undue dumbing down—just clarity of communication.

The style is to-the-point and instructional; it’s neither full of fitness-enthusiast hype nor dry academia, and keeps a light and friendly conversational tone throughout.

Bottom line: if you’d like to get your diet in order and you want to do it right while also knowing which things still need attention (and why) and which you can relax about (and why), then this book will get you there.

Click here to check out Flexible Dieting, and take an easy, relaxed control of yours!

Penny For Your Thoughts?

Wishing you a sure-footed day of good health today and every day,

The 10almonds Team