Holding Back The Clock on Aging

⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

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

• Lifestyle is responsible for about 93% of your longevity—only about 7% is genetics!

• As well as a good diet and exercise, healthy sleep and intermittent fasting are big (positive) influencing factors in longevity.

• When it comes to aging, prevention is a lot easier than a cure. And yet, if the best time to start was way back when, the second-best time is now!

• Worry less about what time you set an alarm for in the morning. Instead, set an alarm for the evening—to remind you when to go to bed.

• Going to therapy can heal your heart. No, we’re not talking metaphorically, but rather: there are measurable benefits to heart health too!

Read on to learn about these things and more…

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

Bulletproof* Your Knees With This Routine

If you want strong, resilient and pain free knees, not just now but also for longevity, then this routine is for you!

In this video, Liv explains why the knees tend to be such a hot target for injury and how we can better protect them:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

*Will make your knees strong and resilient, but still susceptible to actual bullets. Unless you’ve had yours replaced with titanium, in which case, they might indeed be bulletproof!

⏳ MAIN FEATURE

Holding Back The Clock on Aging

This is Dr. Eric Verdin, President and CEO of the Buck Institute of Research on Aging. He’s also held faculty positions at the University of Brussels, the NIH, and the Picower Institute for Medical Research. Dr. Verdin is also a professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco.

Dr. Verdin’s laboratory focuses on the role of epigenetic regulators (especially the behaviors of certain enzymes) in the aging process. He studies how metabolism, diet, and chemical factors regulate the aging process and its associated diseases, including Alzheimer’s.

He has published more than 210 scientific papers and holds more than 15 patents. He is a highly cited scientist and has been recognized for his research with a Glenn Award for Research in Biological Mechanisms of Aging.

And that's just what we could fit here! Basically, he knows his stuff.

What we can do

Dr. Verdin’s position is bold, but rooted in evidence:

See for example:

• From discoveries in aging research to therapeutics for healthy aging

• Optimism, lifestyle, and longevity in a racially diverse cohort of women

• Well-being, food habits, and lifestyle for longevity—evidence from supercentenarians

How we can do it

Well, we all know “the big five”:

• Good diet (Mediterranean Diet as usual is recommended)

• Good exercise (more on this in a moment)

• Good sleep (more on this in a moment)

• Avoid alcohol (not controversial)

• Don’t smoke (need we say more)

When it comes to exercise, generally recognized as good is at least 150 minutes per week of moderate intensity exercise (for example, a brisk walk, or doing the gardening), and at least three small sessions a week of high intensity exercise, unless contraindicated by some medical condition.

As for Dr. Verdin’s take on this…

What Dr. Verdin recommends is:

• make it personalized

• make it pre-emptive

• make it better

The perfect exercise plan is only perfect if you actually do it. And if you actually can do it, for that matter.

Prevention is so much better (and easier) than cure for a whole array of maladies. So while there may be merit in thinking “what needs fixing”, Dr. Verdin encourages us to take extra care to not neglect factors of our health that seem “good enough”. Because, give them time and neglect, and they won’t be!

Wherever we’re at in life and health, there’s always at least some little way we could make it a bit better. Dr. Verdin advises us to seek out those little improvements, even if it’s just a nudge better here, a nudge better there, all those nudges add up!

About sleep…

It’s perhaps the easiest one to neglect (writer’s note: as a writer, I certainly feel that way!), but his biggest take-away tip for this is:

Worry less about what time you set an alarm for in the morning. Instead, set an alarm for the evening—to remind you when to go to bed.

Want to hear directly from the man himself?

Here he is speaking on progress we can expect for the next decade in the field of aging research, as part of the 100 Minutes of Longevity session at The Longevity Forum, a few months ago:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

🌍 AROUND THE WEB

What’s happening in the health world…

• Sleep, food, exercise, stress: why working on one of these can improve the others

• Assessing the feasibility of HRT for post-menopausal women with hand osteoarthritis

• Antiviral pathway a potential new target for Alzheimer’s treatment

• Psychotherapy's hidden bonus: healthier hearts

• New study of age-related macular degeneration finds genetic factors at play

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

This Naked Mind: The myth-busting hit for anyone who wants to cut down their alcohol consumption - by Annie Grace

We've all read about the many, many, dangers of drinking. We've also probably all read about how to make the change to not drinking. Put things out of sight, tell your friends, have this rule, have this excuse (for not drinking) ready to give to people who challenge you, consider a support group, and so on.

What Annie Grace offers in this #1 bestseller is different:

A blend of mostly psychology and sociology, to examine the "liminal thinking" stages that funnel us to drink in the first place... and where that leads, and how to clamber back out of the pitcher plant we weren't necessarily aware we were sliding into.

While she kicks off citing Jung, from a psychological perspective more of this book is CBTish, as it pertains a lot to examining the process of:

• belief—held and defended, based on the...

• conclusion—drawn, often irrationally, from the...

• experience—that we had upon acting on an...

• observation—often mistaking an illusion for the underlying...

• reality

…and how we can and often do go wrong at each step, and how little of the previous steps we can perceive at any given time.

What does this mean for managing/treating alcoholism or a tendency towards alchoholism?

It means interrupting those processes in a careful, surgically precise fashion, so that suddenly... The thing has no more power over us.

Whether you or a loved one struggle with a tendency to addiction (any addiction, actually, the advice goes the same), or are just curious about the wider factors at hand in the epidemiology of addiction, this book is for you.

Get a copy of "This Naked Mind" from Amazon today!

Wishing you long healthy life and happiness,

The 10almonds Team