Don't know if this was posted yet

[moot]

http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/

[Naso]

Medicine is a branch of Engineering?

WHAT?

[AWMac]

What a crock fo Sheeet... I was trying this stuff 80 years ago and it only gave me a headache.

[moot]

Last punt, the more people hear about this, the better.
Layman article.

[storch]

the answer to longevity can be found in genetic predisposition, diet and proper medical care.

in my particular case I come from a broad genetic base ranging from (probably) peasant european stock mixed with west african and caribbean native blood.

I'm 50 years old

I have both parents alive and extremely well
one grandparent, my maternal grandmother aged 92 in good health
my maternal grandfather passed away Sep 2005 at aged 95
my paternal grandmother lived to 102 years
my paternal grandfather to 89 years but his life was complicated by being struck by a car as he was walking home from the corner store where he hung out and played dominos with his geriatric gang.  while the accident didn't kill him outright, it incapacitated him and I believe he lost the will to live.

I take an annual stress test and every year exceed the requirements for a person my age.

this year I will get my first colonoscopy.

I have my prostate examined yearly and take a PSA with my blood tests annually.

I eat a variety of good quality foods with a high content of omega 3 fatty acids and a good mix of fruits and vegetables daily.  I drink around one gallon of water daily.

I supplement my diet with good quality vitamins and minerals as well essential fatty acids and have been doing so since my early 20s.

yet I suffer from hypertension controlled partly by prescribed medication and I'm borderline obese even though I excercise regularly (daily) and don't have a sedentary job.  I drive around quite a bit visiting clients but also inspecting jobsites to see how the jobs are progressing.  I may walk two kilometers every day in this manner.

The hypertension is genetic both of my parents are hypertensive as were all of my grandparents.  my grandparents having lived most their lives with uncontrolled hypertension.  my maternal grandmother's heart is enlarged and will probably be her cause of death.

I think my tendency to be overweight is genetic as well, my brother, sister and I are the least overweight in our large extended family.  I have 22 living cousins and all of us are overweight.  I have one cousin who died at age 30 who was huge but he died of aids related health issues.

none of this predisposes a long life, or a short one either, though all of the conditions seem to be there for a long healthy life.  

when I arise each day I thank my heavenly father for one more day in the sun.  as I go to sleep each night I again thank him for allowing me to complete my obligations for that day.

I already have men that have worked for me for some time having to retire at relatively young ages due to health related issues.

lifestyle choices seem to be the biggest factor in a person's long term health.

of these men that are suffering serious health challenges in their early to mid 50s they all have the following factors in common.

heavy smokers one guy smoked four packs a day.
heavy drinkers
heavy coffee drinkers
poor diet, typical high fat content Cuban diet
never ate fruits or vegetables.

when I stand next to one guy it's hard to believe we are both of the same age.

If you want to live a long and health filled life, in my opinion the most important controllable factors are toxin intake, diet and excercise.

my model would be my grandfathers, both of which lived in extremely good health almost to the day they died, neither ever saw the inside of an assisted living facility, both died at home.  who could ask for more?

[nirvana]

Storch, why do you take extra vitamins and minerals if you eat so healthy?  There should be no need for extra if you are eating enough of what you are supposed to, and in fact more then necesary can damage your body.  Just a little thought.

[lasersailor184]

the answer to longevity can be found in genetic predisposition, diet and proper medical care.

Not necessarily so.  They recently did a study of aging women and their diet habits and exercise habits.

Half the group was to act normally, the other half was to eat a really healthy diet and exercise a lot.


The rate of heart disease, heart problems and health problems was the exact same between the two groups.

Conclusion, genetics make up 98% of how long you will live.

[storch]

Originally posted by nirvana
Storch, why do you take extra vitamins and minerals if you eat so healthy?  There should be no need for extra if you are eating enough of what you are supposed to, and in fact more then necesary can damage your body.  Just a little thought.

Nirvana, vitamin b and c as well as other antioxidants are not readily available just from our diets, especially since the fruits and vegetables that we eat are not freshly picked.  

I supplement:
B
C
Zinc:  these are all water soluable so what the body doesn't need it eliminates.

selenium

DHA
EPA: both of these are essential omega 3 fatty acids woefully lacking in our diet and promote good cardio/vascular health.

Beta-carotine to help maintain my already good eyesight.

Flax seed oil or rose hip oil: which helps to control my cholesterol levels which I am genetic predisposed to be on the high side.  they also help to dimish my triglyceride levels which can become elevated by the blood pressure medication I must take

laser sailor.  there are always conflicting results with these different studies however it is pretty conclusive that a balanced diet of good quality meats, fish, whole grains, legumes, vegetables and fruits goes a long way to enabling our bio-organism to maintain optimum cellular level regeneration.  at my age that's the name of the game.  it really becomes evident when you pit someone like myself against the average western 50 year old in a strenuous physical competition.  recently I've suffered some injuries to my right ankle but prior to that I was in the dojo two to three times weekly and sparring at least once a week against 16-18 year olds.  I don't ever see too many of my peers doing that.

The point is that if you want to reach the waning years of your life in good physical conditions it is clearly the result of having properly cared for the only vessel that will carry you through this life.

I'm glad for the health/lifestyle choices I made in my youth for me they are paying dividends now.

I'm glad that there were people who were preaching these ideas when no one was, prior to research etc.  the holistic approach to health is valid and supplementation is necessary unless you are eating stuff at harvest or has been freshly killed as we were designed to do.

[lasersailor184]

laser sailor. there are always conflicting results with these different studies however it is pretty conclusive that a balanced diet of good quality meats, fish, whole grains, legumes, vegetables and fruits goes a long way to enabling our bio-organism to maintain optimum cellular level regeneration. at my age that's the name of the game. it really becomes evident when you pit someone like myself against the average western 50 year old in a strenuous physical competition. recently I've suffered some injuries to my right ankle but prior to that I was in the dojo two to three times weekly and sparring at least once a week against 16-18 year olds. I don't ever see too many of my peers doing that.

You missed the entire point.



The rate of heart disease and other problems did NOT change with diet change and exercise.  There were thousands of women participating in the study.  Both sides had the same amount of problems at the end.

[lasersailor184]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/health/07cnd-fat.html?ex=1142398800&en=186781fbe3237dd9&ei=5070

Study Finds Low-Fat Diet Won't Stop Cancer or Heart Disease

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Article Tools Sponsored By
By GINA KOLATA
Published: February 7, 2006

The largest study ever to ask whether a low-fat diet reduces the risk of getting cancer or heart disease has found that the diet has no effect.

The $415 million federal study involved nearly 49,000 women ages 50 to 79 who were followed for eight years. In the end, those assigned to a low-fat diet had the same rates of breast cancer, colon cancer, heart attacks and strokes as those who ate whatever they pleased, researchers are reporting today.

"These studies are revolutionary," said Dr. Jules Hirsch, physician in chief emeritus at Rockefeller University in New York City, who has spent a lifetime studying the effects of diets on weight and health. "They should put a stop to this era of thinking that we have all the information we need to change the whole national diet and make everybody healthy."

The study, published in today's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, was not just an ordinary study, said Dr. Michael Thun, who directs epidemiological research for the American Cancer Society. It was so large and so expensive, Dr. Thun said, that it was "the Rolls-Royce of studies." As such, he added, it is likely to be the final word.

"We usually have only one shot at a very large-scale trial on a particular issue," he said.

The results, the study investigators agreed, do not justify recommending low-fat diets to the public to reduce their heart disease and cancer risk. Given the lack of benefit found in the study, many medical researchers said that the best dietary advice, for now, was to follow federal guidelines for healthy eating, with less saturated and trans fats, more grains, and more fruits and vegetables.

Not everyone was convinced. Some, like Dr. Dean Ornish, a longtime promoter of low-fat diets and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, Calif., said that the women did not reduce their fat to low enough levels or eat enough fruits and vegetables, and that the study, even at eight years, did not give the diets enough time.

Others said that diet could still make a difference, at least with heart disease, if people were to eat the so-called Mediterranean diet, low in saturated fats like butter and high in oils like olive oil. The women in the study reduced all kinds of fat.

The diets studied "had an antique patina," said Dr. Peter Libby, a cardiologist and professor at Harvard Medical School. These days, Dr. Libby said, most people have moved on from the idea of controlling total fat to the idea that people should eat different kinds of fat.

But the Mediterranean diet has not been subjected to a study of this scope, researchers said.

And Barbara V. Howard, an epidemiologist at MedStar Research Institute, a nonprofit hospital group, and a principle investigator in the study, said people should realize that diet alone was not enough to stay healthy.

"We are not going to reverse any of the chronic diseases in this country by changing the composition of the diet," Dr. Howard said. "People are always thinking it's what they ate. They are not looking at how much they ate or that they smoke or that they are sedentary."

Except for not smoking, the advice for a healthy lifestyle is based largely on indirect evidence, Dr. Howard said, but most medical researchers agree that it makes sense to eat well, control weight and get regular exercise.

That is also what the cancer society recommends. Dr. Thun, who described the study's results as "completely null over the eight-year follow-up for both cancers and heart disease," said his group had no plans to suggest that low-fat diets were going to protect against cancer.

Others cautioned against being too certain that a particular diet would markedly improve health, and said that whether someone developed a chronic disease might not be entirely under their control — genetics also plays a role.

David A. Freedman, a statistician at the University of California, Berkeley, who is not connected with the study but has written books on the design and analysis of clinical trials, said the results should be taken seriously.

"The studies were well designed," Dr. Freedman said, "and the investigators tried to confirm popular hypotheses about the protective effect of diet against three major diseases in women."

"But," he added, "the diet studied here turned out not to be protective after all."

The study was part of the Women's Health Initiative of the National Institutes of Health, the same program that showed that hormone therapy after menopause might have more risks than benefits.

In this case, the study addressed a tricky problem. For decades, many scientists have said, and many members of the public have believed, that what people eat — the composition of the diet — determines how likely they are to get a chronic disease. But that has been hard to prove. Studies of dietary fiber and colon cancer failed to find that fiber was protective, and studies of vitamins thought to protect against cancer failed to show an effect.

Many cancer researchers have questioned large parts of the diet-cancer hypothesis, but it has kept a hold on the public imagination. "Nothing fascinates the American public so much as the notion that what you eat rather than how much you eat affects your health," said Dr. Libby, the Harvard professor.

The study found that women who were randomly assigned to follow a low-fat diet ate significantly less fat over the next eight years. But they had just as much breast and colon cancer and just as much heart disease. The women were not trying to lose weight, and their weights remained fairly steady. But their experiences with the diets allowed researchers to question some popular notions about diet and obesity.

There is a common belief that Americans get fat because they eat too many carbohydrates. The idea is that a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet leads to weight gain, higher insulin and blood glucose levels, and more diabetes, even if the calories are the same as in a higher-fat diet. That did not happen here.

Others have said the opposite: that low-fat diets enable people to lose weight naturally. But that belief was not supported by this study.

As for heart disease risk factors, the only one affected was LDL cholesterol, which increases heart disease risk. The levels were slightly higher in women eating the higher-fat diet, but not high enough to make a noticeable difference in their risk of heart disease.

Although all the study participants were women, the colon cancer and heart disease results should also apply to men, said Dr. Jacques Rossouw, the project officer for the Women's Health Initiative.

[lasersailor184]

(Page 2 of 2)

Dr. Rossouw said the observational studies that led to the hypothesis about colon cancer and dietary fat included men and women. With heart disease, he said, researchers have found that women and men respond in the same way to dietary fat.

The most recent study follows a smaller one, reported last year, on low-fat diets for women who had breast cancer. That study hinted that eating less fat might help prevent a recurrence. But the current study, asking if a low-fat diet could protect women from breast cancer in the first place, had findings that fell short of statistical significance, meaning they could have occurred by chance.

Dr. Rossouw said he was still intrigued by the breast cancer data, even though it was not statistically significant. The women on low-fat diets had a 9 percent lower rate of breast cancer; the incidence was 42 per thousand per year in women in the low-fat diet group, compared with 45 per thousand per year in women consuming their regular diet.

That could mean that fat in the diet may have a small effect, Dr. Rossouw said, perhaps in some subgroups of women or over a longer period of time. He added that the study investigators would continue to follow the women to see if the effect became more pronounced.

While cancer researchers said they were disappointed by the results, heart disease researchers said they were not surprised that simply reducing total fat had no effect, because they had moved on from that hypothesis.

Of course, Dr. Libby acknowledged, the latest advice, to follow a Mediterranean diet and get regular exercise, has never been tested in a large randomized clinical trial. "If they did a study like that and it was negative," he said, "then I'd have to give up my cherished hypotheses for data."

The low-fat diet was not easy to follow, said Dr. Rowan T. Chlebowski, a medical oncologist at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center and one of the study's principal investigators. Women were told to aim for a diet that had just 20 percent of its calories as fat, and most fell short.

The diet they were told to follow "is different than the way most people eat," Dr. Chlebowski said. It meant, for example, no butter on bread, no cream cheese on bagels, no oil in salad dressings.

"If a physician told a patient to eat less fat, that will do nothing," he said. "If you send someone to a dietitian one time, that will do next to nothing." The women in the study had 18 sessions in small groups with a trained nutritionist in the first year and four sessions a year after that.

In the first year, the women on the low-fat diets reduced the percentage of fat in their diet to 24 percent of daily calories, and by the end of the study their diets had 29 percent of their calories as fat. In the first year, the women in the control group were eating 35 percent of their calories as fat, and by the end of the study their dietary fat content was 37 percent. The two groups consumed about the same number of calories.

Some medical specialists emphasized that the study did not mean people should abandon low-fat diets.

"What we are saying is that a modest reduction of fat and a substitution with fruits and vegetables did not do anything for heart disease and stroke or breast cancer or colorectal cancer," said Dr. Nanette K. Wenger, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. "It doesn't say that this diet is not beneficial."

But Dr. Freedman, the Berkeley statistician, said the overall lesson was clear.

"We, in the scientific community, often give strong advice based on flimsy evidence," he said. "That's why we have to do experiments."

[lasersailor184]

And one more for good measure.

http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/reprint/295/6/655?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=3&andorexacttitle=and&andorexacttitleabs=and&fulltext=Low+Fat+Diet+Heart+Disease&andorexactfulltext=and&searchid=1142266268058_4683&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&fdate=2/1/2006&tdate=2/28/2006&journalcode=jama


(You may or may not be able to see that.  It works with my school's IP)

[Saintaw]

My grandad 98*, alive and still chasing nurses... he smokes cigars and drank a gallon of beer a day. It's the BEER that keeps him alive, heathens.

Almost as old as MT

[lasersailor184]

Seriously.  They always ask the really really old people what they eat that kept them so old.

The answers are always a pack of ciggarettes, bacon, eggs, and toast every morning at least.

[nirvana]

If you have to supplement you aren't eating healthy.  And if you have to supplement vitamin C then you need to hook up to the tomato or orange tree.  Vitamin C is more then readily available, you jus have to eat it.  You may not like oranges or tomatos though, which is understandable as I can't stand tomatos.