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Natural anti aging supplements

How to Slow Down Your Ageing

I often find people in consultations complaining about a symptom or feeling and then putting it down to “old age”. I generally say that “I don’t believe in old age. It is too often claimed when things are going wrong which could be corrected. Yes, it is true that as we things don’t tend to work quite a s well as they did, but often that deterioration is too fast and it could be slowed down even, perhaps, reversed.”

Here are some key pointers to help staying young.

Avoid oxidants

Oxidants speed up cell damage, decrease immunity and reduce our ability to prevent cancer.

One substance known to speed up damage is sugar. Stimulants such as alcohol, coffee, tea and cigarettes also boost our blood sugar levels too and are best avoided or minimised.

Cigarettes have an additional problem. One puff of a cigarette contains over a trillion oxidants (also called free radicals).

Avoid fried foods. Instead food can be sautéed, briefly just to generate enough heart, then add watery sauce to “steam-fry” the ingredients.

Meat and fish also contain fats, which are prone to damage. Baking and steaming them is preferable to frying, grilling or microwaving.

Turning down the toaster helps reduce oxidation.

This time of year avoid sun tanning or solarium. (However, spending an hour a day outside, with sun block as necessary, actually boost the immune system.)

Avoiding pollution is also important especially traffic pollution.

Eat anti-oxidants

Anti-oxidants quench the damaging effects of the oxidants (also call free radicals

Though there are some important vitamins and minerals with anti-oxidant power, certain foods are excellent anti-oxidants, and often more powerful.

Colour is good for you – but only if it is natural! Dark green leafy vegetables are really excellent for you for they have “double the colour” in that once the green is removed they have a bright yellow, orange or red colour that indicates they still have extra anti-oxidants within them. You also need to have a good mix of colours as anti-oxidants work in teams recharging one another.

Great food sources of anti-oxidants include prunes, raisins, blueberries, blackberries, kale, strawberries, spinach, raspberries and plums.

Ultimately aim for 10 to 12 portions of fruit and vegetables a day. (A portion is as big as cup.) Though the government campaign encourages you to eat 5 portions of fruit or vegetables I regard that as inadequate for anti-oxidant intake.

Eat What You Need

Modern life puts a huge strain on our digestive system. We generally eat too much of low nutrient foods, too quickly and without proper chewing.

Refined foods (such as white flour, white rice and white pasta) can require more nutrients to process them than they actually provide the body. Best avoided.

To eat more nutritious foods go for organic food, eat raw or steam.

Chewing food properly (aim for at least 40 times) can make a tremendous difference to how to well you digest your foods and the energy and value you get from them. Two people in concentration camps during the Second World War survived simply by chewing their food thoroughly.

Chewing your food thoroughly prepares the digestive tract for the proper digestion of that food. It also helps prevent you from over-eating because it gives the body time to tell you that it is full before you gobble down the next mouthful.

Controlling your blood sugar is also important because when blood sugar levels dips we have an urge to eat. The problem for many of us is that what we eat directly encourages these dips because it sends the blood sugar too high and from there the body sends it too low in a bid to protect the body from the highs. Key steps to stabilitising blood sugar include: avoiding sugar, avoiding refined foods, avoiding coffee and cigarettes and reducing tea and alcohol.

Cut down on stress

Stress is a major cause of ageing.

Stress shuts down repair and maintenance of the body to deal with a perceived emergency situation – such as a tiger coming towards you. Stress also increased the level of the hormone cortisol and this damages the body and brain. Raised cortisol levels in the elderly are linked to poorer memory stopping the stress helps with recovery, though.

How do you calm stress? Well there are any number of ways and find the right one for you in one of life’s challenges. Here’s one possibility: meditation is a more effective antidote to stress than sleep.

Some of the benefits are: increased peace and contentment, better reponsiveness to stressful events, quicker recovery, reduced heart rate and blood pressure and more stable brain waves.

Keep your homocysteine score low

What is homocysteine? Homocysteine (pronounced hoe-moe-cis-teen) was first suggested as risk factor for heart disease in 1969. At the time that suggestion was rubbished, but over the years more and more evidence emerged that high homocysteine could contribute towards heart disease, depression and Alzheimer’s disease. Now there is a list of over 100 diseases where there is increasing evidence that homocysteine is a factor in their onset or making them worse. Scientific research is really active in this area and homocysteine is getting recognised as a really significant risk factor for many diseases.

As Dr Chris Steele of ITV’s This Morning programme says “Homocysteine is the new cholesterol. It’s potentially your most important health statistic.”

Homocysteine is an oxidant and so generally encourages ageing as well as certain diseases. Unfortunately the homocysteine test is rarely available on the National Health Service (even in cardiac units) and so private testing is often needed.

The great advantage of this test is you change the result. Dietary changes, especially B vitamin rich foods plus (if your score is high) some specialist supplements can reduce your score rapidly.

The average homocysteine score is 11. A super healthy score varies with age. Aim for less than 6 if your are in your 60s or over; less than 5 if you are in your 50s; less 4 if you are in your 40s; 3 or less of you are under 40.

No doubt I will discuss homocysteine in greater detail in a future newsletter. In the meantime you can get the homocysteine test through me.

Keeping young

Here’s summary a quick summary to help you stay young.

 

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