Secrets of Longevity – The Blue Zones

Anti-Aging Solution – A Master Plan

Mindful Living – Anti-Aging Secrets

What Are Antioxidants? Oxidative Damage

Inflammation Process – Signs of Aging

For the purposes of this book, I’m defining “emotional intelligence” as everything that comes under the heading of relationships, community and contribution.

That includes your relationship with yourself (being at peace, contented and satisfied) and your relationships with others. In fact, a really good definition of emotional intelligence is the ability to deal with people effectively from a place of integrity and self-awareness.

We can trace the roots of the concept of emotional intelligence to Darwin, who discovered that there was actually an evolutionary purpose in being responsive to others. Think about it: you need to be able to read cues from other people in order to survive.

Your cavemen ancestors needed to be able to know quickly whether a tribesman was friendly or dangerous. He needed to make a really quick assessment about that wildebeest staring him down on the African Serengeti. (Does it want to be petted? Or is it thinking I’m lunch?)

Being able to relate to and empathize with live beings around you clearly increased your chances for survival.

This kind of intelligence isn’t the kind that allows you to become an International Chess Master or a top brain surgeon, but it’s an intelligence that’s necessary and vital for living well and living long.

The long-lived societies I talk about in “The Most Effective Ways to Live Longer” may have never heard of this peculiarly academic and Western concept of “emotional intelligence”. But they practice it every day. They don’t have a word for it, or books about it, or even a definition of it. But it’s part of their lives- like exercise, healthy food and sleep—and it’s there for us to observe, emulate and adapt to our own circumstances.

There are four processes that age our bodies from the inside out. I’ve nicknamed these “The Four Horsemen of Aging”. They are ubiquitous, insidious, and deadly.

One of them is oxidative damage.

Oxidative damage is the name given to the destruction wrought by rogue molecules known as “free radicals”. The role of free radicals in aging has been recognized at least since the 1950s, when an innovative scientist named Denham Harman, MD, PhD, proposed the free radical theory of aging.

Harman believed that as go the cells, so goes the body. If our cells age, our whole body ages (which makes perfect sense since we are, after all, made up of nothing but cells). Harman saw aging as the cellular accumulation of free radical damage over time—that our bodies are essentially “rusting from within.”

Years later, the free radical theory of aging was expanded to include not just aging, but degenerative diseases in general. We now know that oxidative damage plays a major role in every degenerative disease of aging from Alzheimer’s and cancer to heart disease and diabetes and even immune dysfunction. (Harman was nominated for the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1995.)

One effective way to fight oxidative damage is with antioxidants, which do exactly what their name implies—they work against oxidative damage.

If you’ve read my book, The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth, you probably know that one of the biggest benefits of many of the foods I consider to be the healthiest in the world is that they are absolutely loaded with antioxidants.

Plants have their own built-in protection against the oxidative damage of the sun, and these built-in protectors function as cell protectors in our own body. The very pigments that make blueberries blue and raspberries red protect those berries from oxidative damage, and they do the same for you once inside your body.

The most famous of the powerhouse antioxidants are vitamin C and vitamin E, but that’s only the beginning of the list. Vitamin A is an antioxidant. Minerals like zinc and selenium are powerful antioxidants, as are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of plant compounds known as phytochemicals. Quercitin, for example, is found in apples and onions and has tremendous antioxidant activity. So does curcumin, a phytochemical found in turmeric, the spice that makes Indian food yellow.

Spices in general are a tremendous source of antioxidants as we’ll see later. And nutrients rarely found in any appreciable amount in food, like alpha lipoic acid, are also tremendous weapons in the battle against oxidative damage.

A diet high in antioxidants- from foods and also supplements- is probably one of the best defenses against premature (or unhealthy) aging.

It’s one of the many reasons for the greater health and longevity of people who regularly consume tons of fruits and vegetables.

Of all the books I have written, I am the most proud of “The Most Effective Ways to Live Longer”.

This book contains everything I’ve learned in two decades of study about how to live a long, vigorous, disease-free life filled with passion, joy, energy and radiant good health. It combines information about food and diet with information about emotional intelligence; information about the most effective nutritional supplements alongside the anti-aging secrets of the centenarians in the the “Blue Zones” of Longevity.

It discusses major organs and systems of the body- the heart, the brain, the muscles, the joints, the bones, the immune system and the sex hormones– and tells you in simple terms how to prevent them from breaking down and how to keep them working well into your 9th decade and beyond. And it pulls the most important “take-home” information into a simple, program I call the 7×3 matrix for living longer—easy to do, easy to follow, and based on hundreds of studies about how the human body works.

I want you to read this book- but more importantly, I want you to live this book, because I want you to be able to live life to the fullest and enjoy it every day just as much as I do. And to make the contribution to the world I know you can make if you live life to the fullest.

I hope this book will show you how.

Did you know that the life expectancy the United States is lower than 49 other countries? (We’re ranked number 50 out of 195 countries in the CIA World Factbook, 2009!)

Or worse, that the vast majority of our medical expenses occur in the last three to five years of life, and that those years are frequently plagued by memory loss, disability and general ill health?

Enter “The Four Horsemen of Aging”.

When I was doing research for my latest book, “The Most Effective Ways to Live Longer”, I looked at all the ways our bodies break down. Specifically, I investigated what the research showed about the heart, the brain, the muscles, the joints, the bones, the hormone system and the immune system.

What I found was fascinating.

No matter what organ or system in the body that I looked at, the same four processes kept showing up.

I named these “The Four Horsemen of Aging” because their effects on the body were so systemic, so profound and so far-reaching that they literally were at the bottom of the iceberg of individual diseases. Conquer these four horsemen and you might literally wipe out- or at least significantly diminish- most of the disease we now associate with “aging”.

My good friend Mark Hyman, MD, explains it very well. He says:

“The way we think about disease, mental illness, and our brain aging, actually has nothing, nothing to do with how our body actually works … The way we think about disease is all wrong … the name of the disease tells us nothing about the real reason or the causes of them. Diseases don’t exist.”

Now Mark might be using a bit of poetic license here; certainly “diseases” exist as diagnostic categories. But what he means- and what I talk about in “The Most Effective Ways to Live Longer”—is that what we call “diseases” are actually just specific manifestations of systemic problems, the same basic problems I call the “Four Horsemen of Aging”.

What are those “Four Horsemen of Aging”?

Glad you asked.

They are: Inflammation, Glycation, Oxidative Damage and Stress.

Inflammation is associated with every major degenerative disease on earth, from Alzheimer’s to diabetes, from obesity to cancer. It’s also a big factor in less “life-threatening” diseases like asthma, acne, migraines and arthritis.

Glycation is the process by which excess sugar (from the diet) “gums up the works”, causing circulation problems that- in extreme cases- are the cause of so many diabetes-related issues including amputations. The “thickened” blood can’t get through small blood vessels in the eye and foot, not to mention the kidneys.

Oxidative damage is what happens when nasty rogue molecules called “free radicals” attack your cells and DNA, damaging the body and aging you from within.

And chronic high levels of stress hormones wreck havoc on the body and its systems. They cause extra weight around the abdominal region, and shrink an important part of the brain called the hippocampus that’s central to thinking and memory. (No wonder you can’t remember anything when you’re under stress!)

There is not a disease on earth that doesn’t involve one or more (usually all four) of these issues. And getting at the heart of how to prevent them can go a long way towards helping us age in the most healthful, robust way possible, so that we can live a life of vibrant good health, optimism, joy, well-being and vitality.

The Most Effective Cures On Earth is being released on January 1,2009, Fair Winds Press.

How does living to 100 in vibrant good health sound to you? What would it be like to face your 10th decade looking forward to each new day? And why isn’t this happening in American society?

Every so often, a team of researchers will discover a little corner of the globe where- inexplicably- people routinely live to 100 or more. These areas have come to be known as “The Blue Zones” and scientists have spent hundreds of research hours trying to uncover their secrets.

Most recently, the innovative explorer and writer Dan Buettner has been taking teams of scientists around the world investigating these areas. His work was funded by the National Geographic and the National Institutes on Aging, and his findings were published in the best-selling book, “The Blue Zones”.

The four “Blue Zones” Buettner investigated were a mountainous region of Sardinia off the coast of Italy, the Japanese island of Okinawa, a community of Seventh-day Adventists in Loma Linda, California and the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica. More recently a fifth “blue zone” has been discovered- an isolated and gorgeous Greek Island in the Aegean Sea called Ikaria.

Now understand something here. These folks don’t just “survive” till age 100. Many are out milking cows at 4:30 in the morning in their mid and late 90’s. Many are climbing mountainous regions in their daily duties as shepherds. Very very few are feeble and none are living in assisted living homes! These are vital, happy, healthy people!

What are their secrets?

As it turns out, there is no one secret to living longer successfully, but there are clusters of behaviors that continually show up in all these regions. They don’t all eat the same diet (but their diet has a few things in common). They don’t all live the same lifestyle (but their lifestyles have a lot of things in common). And there are some things that just about every one of the residents of every one of the Blue Zones does on a regular basis.

In “The Most Effective Ways to Live Longer” I took the research of Buettner and others and put together what I believe are the most powerful “secrets” of living longer, learned from the most successful “long lived” people on earth.

I’m a big believer in “learning from the winners. And in the anti-aging sweepstakes, the clear winners are the long-lived people who populate the Blue Zones.