When asked his age, Satchel Paige, one of baseball’s greatest pitchers once replied “Age is a question of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” He was fifty nine when he pitched his last Major League game in 1965. He pitched against Carl Yastrzemski, whose father Satchel pitched against a generation earlier!
What can we do to identify factors that influence age and lifespan? There are seven main health risk factors that are cited by the American Heart Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Dietetic Association. These are: BMI (Body Mass Index), high blood pressure, family history, smoking, high cholesterol, activity level, and age. BMI has been cited as the most critical by the AMA and ADA. Body Mass Index is calculated based on your height in inches and bodyweight. Find out your BMI here. Under 18.5 is considered underweight; 18.5-24.9 is considered normal; 25-29.9 is considered overweight; 30 and over is considered obese. These numbers do not take into consideration your body fat percentage, so a more heavily muscled person can fall into the overweight or even obese category. In general, the BMI does correlate to the average population’s lean mass to fat ratio. It is used by health insurance companies and employers to assess an employee’s health risk.
Dr. Frank Hu of the Harvard School of Public Health led a study that suggested high BMI/bodyfat did in fact take years off lives. “Even modest weight gain during adulthood, independent of physical activity, was associated with a higher risk of death. We estimate that excess weight (defined as a body-mass index of 25 or higher) and physical inactivity (less than 3.5 hours of exercise per week) together could account for 31 percent of all premature deaths, 59 percent of deaths from cardiovascular disease, and 21 percent of deaths from cancer among nonsmoking women.” Adiposity as Compared with Physical Activity in Predicting Mortality among Women, The New England Journal of Medicine, December 23, 2004.
In addition to getting your diet and nutrition under control, exercise can further reduce the impact of the risk factors. Exercising more than twenty minutes four times a week can lower the risk factors as much as ten percent, according to the Cooper Institute for Aerobics Research. Dedicated exercisers can, under their physician’s guidance, sometimes get off blood pressure and cholesterol medication.
Smoking not only causes cancer, but leaches vital micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) from the body’s cells. When this happens, the cells’ functions slow in an effort to preserve what amounts of vitamins and minerals are left. For example, one cigarette will leach one hundred milligrams of vitamin C from the body. We often think of vitamin C as helping to fight colds and infection, but its main function is the formation of collagen. Collagen is the protein matrix found in skin, bone, and connective tissue. When collagen is unable to form properly, skin does not regenerate normally and appears aged beyond actual years. Smokers also often suffer from degenerative disks in the spine, since the disks are made from collagen-based connective tissue.
Through proper nutrition and exercise, it is possible to “roll back the clock” and not only appear younger, but increase the years of your natural life. Lower your risk factors, and lower your Wellness Age.
Leave a Reply