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How to Live Till a 100

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Want to live till 100 years of age? Well, do regular exercises, be married, wash hands and brush your teeth everyday.

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That’s what a new book, ‘The Long Life Equation’, by Dr Trisha Macnair suggests. In the book, the author has listed activities that add years to your life.

Macnair said washing your hands adds two years, and good dental hygiene can add six more years in your life.

But smoking, fast food, no exercise and a stressful life can strip away 20 years.

“There’s no doubt younger people take life and health for granted – more than any generation before, they idle time away watching TV or playing computer games, ignoring the activities that keep them healthy or develop meaning in their lives,” Courier Mail quoted Macnair, as saying.

“As we get older and start to feel the years slipping away, we suddenly realise how precious it is.

“But by then we may have already established habits (smoking, drinking, obesity, lack of exercise, stressful occupations) which take their toll and are difficult to reverse.

“Still, it’s never too late to change. Also, our attitudes to older age are changing so there is more freedom now to do things later in life if we are healthy and able,” she added.

A 2006 study from University of California in Los Angeles showed that men and women live healthier, wealthier, happier and longer lives when they are in a stable partnership

The study confirmed that married couples were more likely to live to an old age than their divorced, widowed or unmarried counterparts.

A stable partnership can actually add on seven years to life.

Regular exercise also adds as much as two or more years to your life.

A Harvard Alumni Study, which took into account more than 71,000 men who had graduated from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania between 1916 and 1954, found that those men who regularly burned 8400kJ a week while exercising lived, on average, two years longer than sedentary types.

But cigarette smoking can actually reduce 8 years from your life

Tobacco smoke contains more than 4000 chemicals, many of which are highly toxic.

A divorce can also strip away 3 years from your life, as it takes longer-lasting, emotional and physical toll on former spouses than virtually any other life stress.

Recent studies indicate that divorced adults have higher rates of emotional disturbance, accidental death and death from heart disease.

The divorced also have higher rates of admission to psychiatric facilities and make more visits to doctors than people who are married, single or widowed.

Sources: The Times Of India

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New Anti-Aging Methods Found

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Researchers said on Thursday they had found more ways to activate the body’s own anti-aging defenses – perhaps with a pill that could fight multiple diseases at once.

Their study, published in the journal Cell, helps explain why animals fed very low-calorie diets live longer, but it also offers new ways to try to replicate the effects of these diets using a pill instead of hunger, the researchers said.

“What we are talking about is potentially having one pill that prevents and even cures many diseases at once,” said David Sinclair, a pathologist at Harvard Medical School who helped lead the research.

Sinclair helped found a company that is working on drugs based on this research, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals. The key is a family of enzymes called sirtuins. They are controlled by genes called SIRT1, SIRT2 and so on.

Last year, researchers showed that stimulating SIRT1 can help yeast cells live longer.

Sinclair, working with colleagues at his company, at Cornell University in New York and the US National Institutes of Health, identified the actions of two more sirtuin genes called SIRT3 and SIRT4.

They found the enzymes controlled by these genes help preserve the mitochondria – little organs inside of cells that provide their energy.

“These two genes, SIRT3 and SIRT4, they make proteins that go into mitochondria. … These are little energy packs inside our cells that are very important for staying healthy and youthful and, as we age, we lose them and they get less efficient,” Sinclair said in a videotaped statement.

“They are also very important for keeping the cells healthy and alive when they undergo stress and DNA damage, as we undergo every day during the aging process.”

Sinclair and colleagues have found in other studies that even if the rest of a cell is destroyed – the nucleus and other parts – it can still function if the mitochondria are alive. His team found that fasting raises levels of another protein called NAD. This, in turn, activates SIRT3 and SIRT4 in the mitochondria of the cell and these help keep the mitochondria youthful.

Source: The Times Of India

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Many Turn to Meditation, Non-Conventional Treatments for Ailments

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At 81, Carmela Hilbert has chronic heart problems and neuropathy in her feet. Yet, she says, in some ways she’s never felt better………..click & see

“I think a lot of it has to with attitude,” Hilbert explains. “I think a lot of it has to do with learning   ” with the fact that you never stop trying something new.”

The newest thing she’s trying is meditation. She walks in a specially built meditation circle called a labyrinth every day near her Bedford, Mass., home.

“You come out of that with a feeling of relaxation and peace that’s very helpful,” she says.

It also helps alleviate pain and symptoms from her ailments, she adds.

Like Hilbert, millions of senior citizens are frustrated with conventional medicine. In fact, research shows more than 60 percent of adults have turned to non-conventional therapy like meditation, perhaps because 30 percent believe traditional medicine can’t help them.

They’re flocking to programs offering spiritual wellness   like meditation, yoga and tai chi.

Frank Rinato, 73, has been practicing tai chi in Brooklyn for 11 years.

“I’ve had bursitis, arthritis, the gout, and I don’t have any of it now,” he says.

Ruth Mitchell, 86, practices with Rinato.

“You know, at one time I felt, ‘Well, this is my life and that’s it,’ ” she says. “But I feel alive again.”

Going Mainstream
None of these therapies is new, but in the past five years mainstream medicine has started giving them scientific attention and support. And insurers are starting to cover the new approaches, looking for ways to contain the rising costs of standard medical treatments.

In 1999, the National Institutes of Health created a Center for Alternative Medicine to study nonconventional treatments. This year, the institute has a $122 million budget.

Dr. Herbert Benson, the president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute and a Harvard Medical School associate professor, has studied the body’s “relaxation response” for nearly 40 years. He says it’s so important because more than 60 percent of visits to the doctor are stress related.

“Thirty-five years ago, mind/body medicine was considered off the radar, flaky,” he says. “Now, there are sufficient data to point out that mind/body medicine can be effective in a number of different conditions in which surgeries and medications are ineffective.”

Academic researchers have recently found that meditation may provide a broad array of benefits   everything from relieving pain to fighting the flu. But many of the studies are preliminary. And skeptics warn against seeing these treatments as a panacea.
Richard Sloan, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University says it is fine for patients to pray or meditate if it makes them feel better.

But he adds, “The question is whether there’s any evidence that it has any medical benefit, and the answer generally is ‘No, it doesn’t have any particular medical benefit.’ ”

Tell that to Hilbert.

“Meditation gives me the energy and the strength to do all the things I do in my life,” she says, “and my life is very full.”
Source:ABC News

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