Health and Longevity

The Economic Crash may Be a Good Thing

posted on March 23, 2009

The economic crash may be a good thing.

What? A good thing? People are losing their homes. Millions have lost half their savings. Businesses are going out of… well… business. Unemployment is sky high, and real estate prices crashed.

Well, I say lots of good may come out of this (including health benefits which I will get to in a moment), in spite of the fact that our government’s “solution” is more socialism and less freedom instead of recognizing that intervention and spending was a primary cause.

I think this crisis is the wake up call we needed to become more productive, to start using our rusty brains, to start exercising our lazy attitudes and to get more efficient.

Let’s face it. As a society, we have become lazy and spoiled by excessive spending, unrealistically high returns on our investments, low interest rates, easy money and skyrocketing real estate prices. All these excesses came into being without any extra effort on our parts. Is there really a lazy man’s way to riches? Can you actually get a free lunch? The answer is, no. Property is created through work, not voodoo. Yet we have come to expect the good life without paying the price.

I tell you this from personal experience. I consider myself to be an enterprising hard working guy. But I got lulled into kicking back in, and even ignoring some areas of my life. One area was managing my finances. And I got slaughtered. Laziness leads to sloppiness. Sloppiness leads to disaster, especially when money is involved. But disaster often leads to creativity and efficiency in order to right the ship. And creativity and efficiency lead to success and prosperity.

Maybe this crisis is the dose of reality we need to get back to the basics necessary to build a solid future. This correction was inevitable. It’s the market’s way of telling us we stepped way over the line.

Now your government is telling you they will fix everything with more of what caused the problem in the first place. In reality, only long-term stability and prosperity can be earned. It’s got to be earned by people like you and me, who collectively will produce more than third parties can steal. And this wake up call may be just what we need to make it happen. (By the way, the emerging technology revolution will eventually pull us out in spite of your government’s actions.)

Healthy habits follow similar patterns.

When we’re healthy, especially when we’re young, we tend to take our good fortune for granted. We usually get away with it for a while… until we start closing in on middle age. Then all sorts of things can go wrong. Just like our financial lives, if we aren’t sitting on a solid foundation, our health starts to erode. Repercussions from the sloppy habits we fell into when things were good start to chip away at our health and longevity. Instead of preparing for our later years by initiating healthy preventative measures, we pave the way for disaster. Most of us even ignore warning signs when we get them, and even more don’t actively look for warning signs by seeing anti-aging physicians who test for them.

So what happens? The inevitable of course. Disaster strikes. It might be a sudden heart attack or stroke. Maybe you’ll get diagnosed with cancer or diabetes. But mark my word. Whatever it is will change your life and most likely your habits. Like our economy, we don’t usually take brain-sweating action until we face a crisis. Sometimes it’s too late for economies, and we see complete meltdowns like they saw in Germany in 1923. And all too often it’s too late to save your health. But lots of us dodge the first bullet, completely change our health habits and transform ourselves to something close to what we should have been, had we not gotten lazy and spoiled by the benefits of youth.

Unless we are faced with a major physical and emotional event that brings about sudden change, we are slaves to the bad habits we picked up along the way. And habits, once established, are extremely hard to change. In fact, we are so resistant to change that we almost need to be tricked into excellence. We have absolutely zero control over any of the global economic events.  If we try to make it all better by trying to control the outside forces that hammer away at our personal lives, we have a very tough life ahead of ourselves. But you can be in control of your personal economy, and you definitely can control your health and longevity.

Why wait for a scare before you start to cleanse your financial well-being and especially your physical well-being?

If you haven’t yet done so, download a copy of Life Extension Express at www.maxlife.org to see how you can avoid health disasters. (By the way, the emerging technology revolution will eventually rescue us out in spite of destructive health habits. The point is to develop these technologies sooner rather than later and to stay alive in the meantime.)
______________________________

A METHUSELAH FOUNDATION PROJECT

A fantastic, originally Serbian immunologist called Janko Nikolich-Zubich, who is a prominent gerontologist and works in Tucson at the University of Arizona, has become very interested in the possibility of being more ambitious about repairing and rejuvenating the immune system than anyone has previously been. He is basically applying a combination therapy to mice whose immune systems are going downhill because of aging and seeing whether the immune systems can be really rejuvenated so that the mice are better at resisting infection, getting back to where they were in early adulthood. It is a reasonably long project, as is more or less any project involving the aging of mice, but it is already underway. It is being funded by the Methuselah Foundation and we are extremely happy about it.

THE LIFE LOST TO FAT

Peto and colleagues found that people who were moderately fat, with a BMI from 30 to 35, lost about three years of life. People who were morbidly fat - those with a BMI above 40 - lost about 10 years off their expected lifespan, similar to the effect of lifelong smoking. Moderately obese people were 50 percent more likely to die prematurely than normal-weight people. Obese people were also two thirds more likely to die of a heart attack or stroke, and up to four times more likely to die of diabetes, kidney or liver problems. They were one sixth more likely to die of cancer.

Levels of fat are a choice for almost all of us. A choice that requires commitment and work over time if we're not where we'd like to be - but who wants to suffer unduly and then die young? If you let yourself go, however, then you are setting up exactly that fate for yourself.
______________________________

LATEST HEALTHY LIFE EXTENSION HEADLINES

On Terror Management Theory (March 20 2009) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4125
Thoughts from Ouroboros: "if an arbitrary belief serves to protect an individual from their fear of death, reminding them of their mortality will cause them to cling to and elaborate this belief. (The underlying edifice, terror management theory, deals with the way in which human minds navigate the double-bind of being simultaneously aware of our desire to preserve our lives and the technical impossibility of doing so.) The classical example of such a belief would be a religion promising an afterlife. It also works just fine with a belief in which the individual, by dint of some combination of industry, sagacity and/or having been born in the right century, has a chance of not dying at all. A prediction: life extension advocates might tend to increase their estimation of the feasibility of significant longevity enhancement after being confronted by reminders of their own finite lifespans. (I know I feel a twinge even writing those words, so I suspect this prediction has some real teeth.)"

Living Scaffolds for Nerve Regeneration (March 20 2009) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4124
Via ScienceDaily: researchers "have engineered transplantable living nerve tissue that encourages and guides regeneration in an animal model. We have designed a cylinder that looks similar to the longitudinal arrangement of the nerve axon bundles before it was damaged. The long bundles of axons span two populations of neurons, and these neurons can have axons growing in two directions - toward each other and into the host tissue at each side. The constructs were transplanted to bridge an excised segment of the sciatic nerve in rats. Up to 16 weeks post-transplantation, the constructs still had their pre-transplant shape, with surviving transplanted neurons at the extremities of the constructs spanned by tracts of axons. Remarkably, the host axons appeared to use the transplanted axons as a living scaffold to regenerate across the injury. The constructs survived and integrated without the use of immunosuppressive drugs, challenging the conventional wisdom regarding immune tolerance in the peripheral nervous system."

Towards a Cytomegalovirus Vaccine (March 19 2009) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4122
Cytomegalovirus (CMV) causes much of the decay of our immune system over the years by cluttering it up with uselessly specialized anti-CMV cells. Via EurekAlert!: "results of a trial involving 441 CMV-negative women give rise to optimism that a vaccine to prevent congenital CMV may be closer. Women who received the trial vaccine were 50 percent less likely to later become infected with CMV. Aspects of CMV biology have caused skeptics to question whether it is possible to prevent infection through vaccination, explains. The virus is well adapted to persist in an infected person and is readily passed from person to person through direct contact with numerous bodily fluids. Healthy people typically experience no symptoms after being infected with CMV. There is a strong immune response to the initial infection, but this immunity cannot always prevent subsequent infections if a person re-encounters the virus. Finally, natural infection does not elicit a response sufficient to completely eliminate the virus. On the contrary, once a person is infected, the virus persists for life." A vaccine is a start, but it doesn't help those of us already damaged by exposure: some methodology must be developed to remove specialized immune cells and restore function rather than just prevent loss.

Alzheimer's as Diabetes of the Brain (March 18 2009) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4120
The lifestyle risk factors for Alzheimer's disease look a lot like those for diabetes - in other words get fat and don't exercise and your brain will suffer. Some researchers propose that Alzheimer's is a form of
diabetes: "Insulin is the hormone that allows cells, including some brain cells, to take up energy in the form of glucose. Proper insulin function in the brain appears necessary to the formation and maintenance of memories. And, crucially, a lack of insulin or insulin resistance is connected both to amyloid protein regulation and to the modification of tau proteins, which can cause tangles. In other words, insulin seems to hold up a conceptual umbrella under which the amyloid and the tangle camps might finally meet. Type 2 diabetes is also a risk factor for Alzheimer's and cognitive decline. In 2005, researchers at Brown showed that by knocking out insulin production and causing brain insulin resistance in rats, they could create a model of Alzheimer's, complete with plaques and abnormal accumulations of tau. Scientists have also described links between abnormal insulin and other hallmarks of Alzheimer's, such as oxidative damage and inflammation."

Telomere Length and the Sister Study (March 17 2009) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4118

Some more evidence that shortened telomere length correlates with conditions and risk factors that are known to be bad for your long term health: "One of the studies published this week found that women who were obese for a long time had reduced telomere length. The researchers looked at the relationship between various measures of current and past body size and telomere length in 647 women enrolled in the Sister Study. They found that women who had an overweight or obese body mass index (BMI) before or during their 30s, and maintained that status since those years, had shorter telomeres than those who became overweight or obese after their 30s. This suggests that duration of obesity may be more important than weight change per se, although other measures of overweight and obesity were also important. Our results support the hypothesis that obesity accelerates the aging process. Women who reported above-average stress had somewhat shorter telomeres, but the difference in telomere length was most striking when we looked at the relationship between perceived stress and telomere length among women with the highest levels of stress hormones. Among women with both higher perceived stress and elevated levels of the stress hormone epinephrine, the difference in telomere length was equivalent to or greater than the effects of being obese, smoking or 10 years of aging."

Back to Top