Get Ready…. You are Going to Live Longer!
There are many reasons why we need to eat healthy: to navigate through life, to feel energized, to exercise, etc. but one particular reason why we need to eat well is to prevent disease.
Like Christiane Northup says: we need to live life like Happy- Healthy-Dead, so it means a long happy life and then just go very quickly! That actually has a name according to Andrew Weil, it is called compression of morbidity. And we need to increase the likelihood of compression of morbidity. If we look at some of the healthiest communities in the world, there is one in Okinawa (Japan), where their morbidity is about 1 year. The average morbidity in the USA is 3 years and we spend 95% of healthcare costs in those 3 years. In Okinawa it is 1 year and they spend 1/3 of the cost.
There is a lot we can do to live longer since 80 % of diseases can be prevented and in many cases reversed through nutrition and lifestyle. It is very clear, food is Medicine; food is information for our cells. And the important thing is the environment of the cell, what we eat, feel, think and do has an impact on the environment of the cell. There is a science called epigenetics, we should be able to turn on the good genes and turn off the bad genes though nutrition and lifestyle management.
Science is advancing, and researchers are studying how to increase longevity. Check this book out to see how science is working towards that goal: Morir Joven, a los 140 by Maria A. Blasco and Mónica G. Salomone.
In that book, it is mentioned that there are studies reporting that, among other aspects, the Mediterranean diet, exercise and education improve longevity.
In a study published last year, scientists at the University of California at Los Angeles and Nobel Prize winner Elizabeth Blackburn found that 12 minutes of daily yoga meditation for eight weeks increased telomerase activity by 43 percent, suggesting an improvement in stress-induced aging. Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, shared the Nobel medicine prize in 2009 with Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for research on the telomerase “immortality enzyme,” which slows the cellular aging process.
So yes, if we keep making progress in the right direction we will live longer and longer…
Therefore, let’s pace ourselves…Since life is very long, we should try to focus our energy and prioritize what we want to do in the short, medium and long term. And always leaving something for when we get older and older. There is no need to do everything at once, not now! If we are going to live longer-and we will if science keeps making progress and we make the conscious decision to eat healthy and manage a healthy lifestyle- we will need a plan for the later years!!
Furthermore, we need to surround ourselves with those who love us…sometimes it is hard to receive everything we want from the same person, and that is fine (ie. I mean at work, home, community, group of friends, etc.) so we need an army of likeminded people who reciprocate what we give to them, we can’t do this alone!!
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Virginia