Anti Aging Techniques
One day you are moaning about how early you have to wake up to go to school, the next minute you are looking in a mirror and wondering where the years went and how you got so old. While we can’t turn back the clock for you we can show you some anti aging techniques which will help slow down the effects of father time.
I hope you find these anti aging tips useful and as long as you take action you should be OK.
Aging affects us in two main areas, external and internal. These areas are actually related and the things you do to help one area will usually help another. In this anti aging guide we have tried to cover as many specific things you can do to help yourself.
Anti Aging Techniques
You Are What You Eat
Everything you eat and drink affects you, as a kid we were all to to eat our veggies and make sure we get plenty of vitamin c. Well your mum was right, if you eat well you will feel and look healthier.
Most processed foods and fizzy drinks contain many many chemicals, the more chemicals you put into your body the more your body will age prematurely. This is amongst the simplest of the anti aging techniques, you are in control of what you eat.
Exercise
The vast majority of us now work on a computer for a lot, if not the majority of the day. This means we don’t move around much at all, we don’t get any exercise.
Add this to the amount of “junk” food we are eating and you can see why your body is prematurely aging from the inside out. We were designed to be hunter gatherers, now we hunt in the fridge or at the pizza delivery place and gather all the calories we can find.
Exercise and food are probably the easiest anti aging techniques to master.
Skin Care
When you are younger you can be ready to go in 10 minutes flat, as you get older you need to take more care of yourself and this means it takes longer to get ready. The time you spend today caring for your skin and your general appearance is one of the main anti aging techniques you need to master.
The main skin care techniques that you should learn are keeping your skin hydrated. It is when your skin drys up that it starts to look old, you should start caring for your skin early and don’t stop.
Water
We often hear that we are 70% water and yet we often don’t drink enough of it to keep that level topped off. When you are looking at anti aging techniques drinking water is one of the easiest and most effective anti aging techniques you will ever come across.
Drinking more water will not only help your skin stay hydrated it will also help flush out any toxins that have come into your body (normally through your food). You do not have to drink expensive bottled water, buy a metal water bottle for $5 and fill it up wherever you can.
One of my favorite anti aging techniques is to fill up 6 small water bottles and put them in your fridge and you know you have to drink at least that many each day.
Smoking
I don’t think anyone can deny that smoking is bad for you, all too many of us have lost someone to cancer. One thing that I have noticed with smokers is that they all seem to be aging prematurely when you look at their skin. So the next in our list of anti aging techniques is to quit smoking.
Alcohol
Nothing wrong with a glass of red wine here and there, in fact there is plenty of medical proof that it may be good for you. But if you are drinking vast quantities daily or binge drinking then you are aging your body prematurely.
When you start thinking about turning back the clock it can be tempting to look at anti aging potions which offer the miracle cure rather than learning anti aging techniques which take time and conscious effort.
The anti aging techniques we have discussed here will give you a good start on the path to looking and feeling younger.
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Is It Your Genes Or The Way You Live That Determines How Long You Live?
Your Lifestyle Determines the Majority of Your Longevity
In an interesting article in the Asian Scientist about the 2011 Elderly Health Day in Hong Kong, I found a couple tidbits.
One was that Dr. Bernard Kong who is the President of the Hong Kong Geriatrics Society made a comment that, “Skeletally, people are actually designed to live to 120.” Imagine that. We aren’t living up to the innate body design.
Given that he goes further to state that as much as 70% of our life spans can be traced back to the way we live our lives, then this means we are living in such a way as to break our given design earlier in life. Even in the U.S. with an average life span in the very late 70s, we are missing out on better than 40 more years of life. Wow! What a slap in the face for a wake up call.
The article goes on to talk about a very special social worker they call “Sister Teresa” who took up nursing after WWII and has since become one of Singapore’s “most cherished treasures”. She is 113.
She gives her secrets to her longevity which include a positive mental outlook, contribution, eating a healthy diet (which she mentions in this article), yoga and meditation. As I said, an interesting read here at http://www.asianscientist.com/topnews/teresa-hsu-elderly-health-day-2011/
No, It Is Your Genes That Buffer Your Lifestyle to You Live Longer
In an article from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of the Yeshiva University in New York City, we get what appears to be completely different information about lifestyle and genes than the first section of this post.
The findings of this study were published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society on August 3rd. Using a group of Ashkenazi Jews between the ages of 95 – 112, a survey about the way they had lived at 70 was asked. It was assumed that however they lived at that age was how they had generally lived most of their adult lives. This group was used in the study as they are “more genetically uniform than other populations”.
The outcome of the study was that their genes were more important to their long lives than how they had lived their lives. There was only one factor that was significantly different in the group as compared to a group of similarly aged folks using data from the National Health and Nutrition Survey from 1971 to 1975. That factor was the statistically significantly less percentage of obese people among the Ashkenazi Jews than among the population at large (as defined by the comparison group).
The scientists involved in the study think this outcome suggests that this group “… may possess additional longevity genes that help to buffer them against the harmful effects of an unhealthy lifestyle.” But they also caution that just because they have drawn the conclusion that genes are what let these people live so long, we should still be careful of how we live. We should not smoke, we should be care of how we eat, we should exercise and we should keep our weight down.
Anti Aging Diet
Well, whether we find out it was our genes that helped us to live longer or the way we live that helps us to make the most of what we have, one thing is for sure. The way we eat is going to determine how healthy we are. Even if we should live a long time due to our genes, we want to be healthy while doing so. To that end, chasing the perfect anti aging diet might be a worthwhile goal.
That link should give you more information to peruse as synopses of various anti aging diets are added now and then.
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New DNA Study Concerning Telomeres and Health Records
An article in The Sacramento Bee tells us that Kaiser Permanente and the University of California at San Francisco are using a $24,800,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to study DNA samples from Kaiser clients who volunteered to be part of the study. What this joint venture are doing first is looking at the length of the telomeres along with lifestyle and environment questionnaires the volunteers filled out. Add in the health records of all these people from Kaiser and you are going to have one very large database of information.
Not only do they have the lifestyle data, but with the health records scientists doing the study will know what diseases these people have as they look at the telomere data. They figure they will be able to answer a lot of questions about “how genes and the environment can influence things like aging, physical and mental health, and cognitive functions.”
This will be a long on-going study as there will be tons and tons of data that can be extracted from the samples. And that’s without actually sequencing all of the DNA. I wonder when we will see something of real use from this study and for benefit of the man in the street, not just the health companies.
Men Fight to Look Younger Too
Many of us have this image that it is women who fight the hardest to keep looking young as they get older. Not so true anymore regardless of men like my husband who insists that he proudly wears every wrinkle he has earned.
In fact this article from The Star is filled with all kinds of statistics showing men, too, are buying all the creams and anti aging techniques just like women. Some statistics given in the article are that:
- Skincare products for men are now a $217 million industry up from $41 million in 1997.
- Cosmetic procedures including the leader Botox for men have increased ~90% since 1997.
- New lines of skincare products targeting men are appearing on the store shelves.
What is driving this new interest in looking young in men? The article gives a couple of reasons among which are company upper management think looking old affects their jobs and that divorced men in their 60s want to date women in their 30s, not women their own age.
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