Aerobic capacity is your body’s ability to process oxygen within a given time. That is:

1. to rapidly breathe amounts of air into the lungs for aeration of the blood;

2. to deliver large volumes of blood forcefully via the pumping action of the heart; and

3. to transport effectively oxygen to all parts of your body through the bloodstream.

To do these things efficiently, you need healthy lungs, a powerful heart, and a good vascular network. In short, the focus here is on your:

• heart

• lungs

• circulatory mechanisms

So how do you look after your heart:

Following a few simple rules can significantly decrease your chances of developing heart disease.

DIET

1. Limit intake of trans fats and hydrogenated oils found in margarine, fast food, fried food, Avoid Processed Foods

2. Limit refined sugar intake from cakes, cookies, candy, etc for a healthy sugar alternative try trehalose

3. Use extra virgin olive oil and garlic in cooking – they can lower cholesterol – so can a diet rich in plant stanols

4. Add Omega 3 Fatty Acids to your diet – the best source is Fish Oil – but make sure it is pure

EXERCISE

Developing a gentle but consistent exercise program will also lower your risk of heart disease.

1. Try to exercise 3-4 times per week, for at least a half hour at a time.

2. Keep your routine going, and start off slow.

3. Always stretch before and after training.

4. Keep yourself hydrated and rest between sets.

DEVELOP A HEALTHY LIFESTYLE

1. Stop smoking and avoid second hand smoke – both are major causes of heart disease.

2. Limit your intake of alcohol – excessive alcohol can deplete your body’s supply of vitamins and other nutrients.

3. Try to reduce stress and anxiety – they can lead to high blood pressure and other health conditions.

4. Keep your weight within recommended limits – obesity is a leading cause of heart disease.

FOUR BIOMARKERS

1. This may be contentious but it’s based on sound science. Cholesterol is an over emphasised biomarker and the evidence that artificially lower it with drugs is not supported in my opinion. You can lower cholesterol naturally but remember, only 20% of your cholesterol comes from what you eat, the other 80% is manufactured by your liver.

2. If your triglyceride (fat) levels are too high, lower your carbohydrate and refined sugar (sucrose actually) intake. Also, fish oil, Vitamin C, are safe natural ways to lower triglyceride levels.

3. If your homocysteine levels are high, you can easily normalize the situation by including B Vitamins in your diet:

1. Folic Acid – also known as Vitamin B9, folic acid can help the body produce the enzymes necessary to remove homocysteine from the blood.

2. Vitamin B6 – along with folic acid and Vitamin B12, helps reduce homocysteine levels.

3. Vitamin B12 – works with folic acid and Vitamin B6 to assist in homocysteine removal.

4. If your C Reactive Protein levels are high, this indicates inflammation in the body. A change of lifestyle is helpful here and Fish oil, ginger and MSM will help decrease inflammation naturally. Also a supplement containing peptide chains that reduce the level of Angio Tensin Converting Enzyme (ACE) are helpful.

HELPING THE LUNGS

1. Stop smoking

2. use your lungs – breath deeply – this simple tip is often overlooked

3. reduce the time spent in areas with airborne contamination – cities, smoky atmospheres

CIRCULATION

The 3 best things you can do to aid circulation are:

1. to drink more water

2. reduce your body fat content

3. exercise

• causes the metabolism to rise, meaning you can more easily burn body fat and alter your body composition even further in favour of beneficial muscle tissue.
• increases your aerobic capacity-and the health of your whole cardiovascular system-because you have more working muscles -consuming oxygen.
• triggers muscle to use more insulin, thus greatly reducing the chances you’ll ever develop diabetes.
• helps maintain higher levels of the beneficial HDL-cholesterol in your blood.

So how do you get better bones and muscles.

1. Simple exercise – walking is free but invaluable – you don’t need to join a gym and we can all do it
   • cyclic loading of bones is a key antidote to osteoporosis
   • eat plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables (note not cooked) for calcium
2. Simple strength training with small weights – can of beans is a good place to start
   • sit in a chair watching television and just do simple arm raises – holing the bean can and doing it slowly
   • again sitting – raise the leg horizontal and hold for a count of 5 and gently lower – repeat 10 times
   • remember it is not the size of the weights that’s important but the number of times you repeat it

Obesity Rates - Men and Women

Now the interesting thing is that obesity rates remained almost static until the emergence of the figures in the late 1970s. For years the rates had been reasonably static 15-20% for probably a hundred years. In the early to mid 1980s, coincidentally very close to emergence of the belief that fats in foods were very bad, the rates began to rise massively. Why was that?

We were being told to eat less animal fats and more so called “low-fat-spreads”. The fat in foods was often replaced by sugar and that is part of the problem – excess sugar leads to a gain in stored glycogen in fat cells. In my opinion the culprit is not fat but hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated fats and oils used in industrial food processing.

The estimates for 2010 suggest that for the UK that obesity rates for men and women will exceed 40% and including those overweight the overall figures come out close to 70% either overweight or obese.

Link the carrying of excess fat around the waits as one of the main indicators of elevated cancer risk and suddenly being overweight doesn’t just accelerate ageing but actively shorten life and reduce quality of life accordingly.

Reduce the fat content in our bodies and we should also see the reduction in the rate of ageing.

“Metabolism” refers to the chemical processes in your body that build and destroy tissue and release energy, thereby generating heat. “Basal” means at baseline or at rest. So your basal metabolism is the rate of your body chemistry when your exertion is minimal. It’s usually measured just as you wake from sleep, which is about the same as when you’re sprawled out on, the sofa watching television.

Your basal metabolic rate (BMR) – or caloric expenditure at rest – falls with age. Study after study has tried to quantify the extent of this BMR slowdown. Researchers always came up with widely divergent figures until they realized that a person’s lean-body mass is the key to compiling a definitive figure.

OK – great news – but how do we combat it. Sounding a  bit repetitious now? EXERCISE.

There is no substitute for exercise. If you want to stay healthy and slow down the ageing process then you have to exercise. OK there are some people who will struggle to walk and some who just can’t seem to get out of the chair. For them it may be too late but it has to be worth trying. Exercise is what gives you health and now it also seems to be a component in slowing down ageing.

By the way I’m not suggesting joining a gym or taking up running a half marathon every day. Exercise needs to be tailored to your level of health and fitness and needs to be appropriate to your age. You should seek guidance from your GP and take things slowly. Remember Rome wasn’t built in a day.

As we age, we lose whole motor units (a measurement of muscle). In cross-sectional studies, it’s been estimated that over the 40-year span between age 30 and 70, people experience a 20 percent decrease in the number of motor units in their thigh, for example. Similar decreases are sustained in both large and small muscle groups all over our body.

Gradual muscle loss is the catalyst for a number of other age-related changes in your body. These adverse changes are . . .

• a slowdown in your metabolism
• a steady increase in body fat
• a declining aerobic capacity
• a reduced blood-sugar tolerance
• a continuing loss in bone density

So how do we prevent or reduce the loss of muscle.

• We exercise what we have – use it or lose it
• we give the body the nutrition it deserves and requires – protein, fats and oils, carbohydrates, Vitamins and Minerals
  • we either get these elements from our diets (good quality natural food) and supplement where necessary with concentrated food source supplements
• we take regular and frequent light exercise
  • walking,
  • breathing – deep cyclical breathing is hugely important and beneficial
  • mobility – exercise the joints and muscles through their full range of movement
  • control exercises – practice manual and physical tasks that require fine muscle control – knitting,
• make exercise a priority – 10 minutes walking twice a day is enough for most people to improve their health

Muscles will only strengthen if the exercise adds:

• Resistance e.g. adding more weight
• Number of repetitions with a particular weight
• Number of sets of the exercise

Again the saying Use it or lose it is just about where it is at.

• Biomarker 1: Your Muscle Mass
• Biomarker 2: Your Strength
• Biomarker 3: Your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR)
• Biomarker 4: Your Body Fat Percentage
• Biomarker 5: Your Aerobic Capacity
• Biomarker 6 Your Body’s Blood-Sugar Tolerance
• Biomarker 7: Your Cholesterol/HDL Ratio
• Biomarker 8: Your Blood Pressure
• Biomarker 9: Your Bone Density
• Biomarker 10:Your Body’s Ability to Regulate Its Internal Temperature

If we make some assumptions and conclude that we’ll live relatively free from illness until the age of 65 years and from that point we begin to experience a growing level of disability due to ageing and illness. We may experience 20 years or more of life after the age of 65 years and we’ll  spend 20 years of our lives in the disability zone.

What happens today for most people is that they begin to rely more and more heavily on pharmaceutical drugs to manage the symptoms of physical dysfunction or illness as they get older.What would happen if instead of reliance on pharmaceuticals we focussed on these 10 biomarkers of ageing and sought to improve them. The evidence from around the world is becoming clearer every day. The earlier we begin to address these biomarkers with natural food, exercise and water (and supplementation where required) there is every probability that we can extend the point at which we enter the disability zone by many years.

A recent study published in the Public Library of Medical Science (January 2008) found that basic healthy habits can add up to 14 years to your life – delaying the entrance into the disability zone by many years. Their focus was on cessation of smoking, eating 5 servings of fruit and vegetables, moderate exercise and moderate alcohol consumption. It was nothing extreme.

So to start with but look at the 10 biomarkers of ageing proposed by the medical community:

Biomarker 1: Your Muscle Mass

Biomarker 2: Your Strength

Biomarker 3: Your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR)

Biomarker 4: Your Body Fat Percentage

Biomarker 5: Your Aerobic Capacity

Biomarker 6: Your Body’s Blood-Sugar Tolerance

Biomarker 7: Your Cholesterol/HDL Ratio

Biomarker 8: Your Blood Pressure

Biomarker 9: Your Bone Density

Biomarker 10:Your Body’s Ability to Regulate Its Internal Temperature

A continuing controversy is whether there exist processes of ageing per se, which can be identified and studied independently of age-related disease. It is clear that there are age-related risk factors for disease, and that these overlap with risk factors for ageing, but there is disagreement about whether diseases to which older persons are vulnerable should be considered merely by-products of ageing, or an essential component of the ageing processes.

In response to “How old are you” He would say, “How you suppose to answer if you didn’t know how old you was?” Paige never knew his exact chronological age because he was born before good records were kept. He used to tell people to use his performance on the pitcher’s mound to estimate his age. But that was almost impossible because Paige’s long heyday as a leading pitcher stretched from the 1920’s to 1950’s.

If you didn’t know your age how would you feel?

I.

Our medical care system is ‘broken’ mainly because it focuses on the problem (i.e. the ‘war’ on cancer, diabetes, heart disease, etc.), and war is quite profitable but it acts as a parasite that is feeding on its ‘host’ (that would be the population at large in this example).   For any ‘healthcare’ system to work we must focus on ‘health’ which by nature will ‘starve’ the parasite.  Unfortunately that ‘parasite’ has money, power, lobbyists and the government that is all too susceptible to those influences in order to be re-elected.

Real change must happen from the grass roots and move up and it begins with people knowing the truth.  Politicians rarely ‘see the light’ until they ‘feel the heat’ and an educated public is needed to ‘bring the heat’.

Heart Surgeon Admits Huge Mistake!

We physicians with all our training, knowledge and authority often acquire a rather large ego that tends to make it difficult to admit we are wrong.  So, here it is.  I freely admit to being wrong.  As a heart surgeon with 25 years experience, having performed over 5,000 open-heart surgeries, today is my day to right the wrong with medical and scientific fact.

I trained for many years with other prominent physicians labelled “opinion makers.”  Bombarded with scientific literature, continually attending education seminars, we opinion makers insisted heart disease resulted from the simple fact of elevated blood cholesterol.

The only accepted therapy was prescribing medications to lower cholesterol and a diet that severely restricted fat intake.  The latter of course we insisted would lower cholesterol and heart disease.  Deviations from these recommendations were considered heresy and could quite possibly result in malpractice.

It Is Not Working!

These recommendations are no longer scientifically or morally defensible.  The discovery a few years ago that inflammation in the artery wall is the real cause of heart disease is slowly leading to a paradigm shift in how heart disease and other chronic ailments will be treated.

The long-established dietary recommendations have created epidemics of obesity and diabetes, the consequences of which dwarf any historical plague in terms of mortality, human suffering and dire economic consequences.

Despite the fact that 25% of the population takes expensive statin medications and despite the fact we have reduced the fat content of our diets, more Americans will die this year of heart disease than ever before.

Statistics from the American Heart Association show that 75 million Americans currently suffer from heart disease, 20 million have diabetes and 57 million have pre-diabetes. These disorders are affecting younger and younger people in greater numbers every year.

Simply stated, without inflammation being present in the body, there is no way that cholesterol would accumulate in the wall of the blood vessel and cause heart disease and strokes.  Without inflammation, cholesterol would move freely throughout the body as nature intended.  It is inflammation that causes cholesterol to become trapped.

Inflammation is not complicated — it is quite simply your body’s natural defense to a foreign invader such as a bacteria, toxin or virus.  The cycle of inflammation is perfect in how it protects your body from these bacterial and viral invaders.  However, if we chronically expose the body to injury by toxins or foods the human body was never designed to process, a condition occurs called chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is just as harmful as acute inflammation is beneficial.

What thoughtful person would willfully expose himself repeatedly to foods or other substances that are known to cause injury to the body?  Well, smokers perhaps, but at least they made that choice willfully.

The rest of us have simply followed the recommended mainstream diet that is low in fat and high in polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates, not knowing we were causing repeated injury to our blood vessels.  This repeated injury creates chronic inflammation leading to heart disease, stroke, diabetes and obesity.  Let me repeat that. The injury and inflammation in our blood vessels is caused by the low fat diet that has been recommended for years by mainstream medicine.

What are the biggest culprits of chronic inflammation? Quite simply, they are the overload of simple, highly processed carbohydrates (sugar, flour and all the products made from them) and the excess consumption of omega-6 vegetable oils like soybean, corn and sunflower that are found in many processed foods.

In Part 2 of this two-part article, I’ll discuss which foods cause inflammation, how those foods trigger the inflammatory process, and the foods to eat that will cure inflammation.

[Ed. Note: Dr. Dwight Lundell is the past Chief of Staff and Chief of Surgery at Banner Heart Hospital, Mesa, AZ.  His private practice, Cardiac Care Center was in Mesa, AZ.  Recently Dr. Lundell left surgery to focus on the nutritional treatment of heart disease.  He is the founder of Healthy Humans Foundation that promotes human health with a focus on helping large corporations promote wellness. He is the author of The Cure For Heart Disease and The Great Cholesterol Lie.

We love this article because it shows the power that simple habits, one of which is exercise, have on your long-term health. If you need some of that “practical support” mentioned in the last paragraph, we are happy to help. Our Health Offer was designed to provide this type of support.

Healthy Habits May Give 14 Years

To get an extra 14 years of life, don’t smoke, eat lots of fruits and vegetables, exercise regularly and drink alcohol in moderation.

That is according to a study published Monday in the Public Library of Science Medicine journal.

After tracking more than 20,000 people aged 45 to 79 years in the United Kingdom from about 1993 to 2006, Kay-Tee Khaw of the University of Cambridge and colleagues found that people who adopted these four healthy habits lived an average of 14 years longer than those who didn’t.

“We’ve known for a long time that these behaviours are good things to do, but we’ve never seen these additive benefits before,” said Susan Jebb, head of Nutrition and Health at Britain ’s Medical Research Council. Jebb was not involved in the study.

“Just doing one of these behaviours helps, but every step you make to improve your health seems to have an added benefit,” she said. The benefits were also seen regardless of whether or not people were fat and what social class they came from.

Study participants scored a point each for not smoking, regular physical activity, eating five servings of fruits and vegetables a day and moderate alcohol intake. People who scored four were four times less likely to die than those who scored zero.

Researchers tracked deaths from all causes, including cardiovascular disease, cancer and respiratory diseases.

Participants filled in a health questionnaire and nurses conducted a medical exam at a clinic. The study was largely paid for by the Medical Research Council and Cancer Research United Kingdom.

Khaw said that the study should convince people that improving their health does not always require extreme changes to their lifestyles. “We didn’t ask these people to do anything exceptional,” Khaw said. We measured normal behaviors that were entirely feasible within people’s normal, everyday lives.”

Public health experts said they hoped the study would inspire governments to introduce policies helping people to adopt these changes.

“This research is an important piece of work which emphasizes how modifying just a few risk factors can add years to your life,” said Dr. Tim Armstrong, a physical activity expert at the World Health Organization.

Experts are unsure if these new findings will actually improve the public’s health.

“What stops people from changing their behavior is not a lack of knowledge,” Jebb said. ”Most people know that things like a good diet matter and that smoking is not good for you,” she said. “We need to work on providing people with much more practical support to help them change.”

Researchers at Pennington Biomedical Research Centre in Baton Rouge , Louisiana , reported findings from a study involving 464 women who weren’t exercisers. After six months, a group who walked an average of 72 minutes a week at two to three mph that’s about 10 minutes of mall-pace striding a day had significantly improved heart strength and general fitness, nearly matching the efforts of women exercising almost twice as long.

“Your body responds very positively, very quickly to even small amounts of exercise,” says lead study author Tim Church, MD, PhD. “If you’re sedentary, you’ll see a lot of your greatest gains going from zero to 10 minutes a day.”

More exercise is definitely better, but based on Church’s findings and the studies below, there’s evidence you can take your time easing into those longer workouts.

Why 10 Minutes is Better Than None

Build Muscle
A seven-week study of 22 couch potatoes found that those who did just one set of 10 repetitions of seven strength-training moves (about 10 minutes of lifting) three days a week gained as much strength as those who did a 30-minute, three-set routine.

Boost your mood
In a recent study of 48 men and women, spinning on a bike for 10 minutes led to a mood lift and drop in depression and fatigue similar to what they’d get riding three times as long.

Protect your joints
After tracking nearly 4,000 women in their 70s for three years, researchers found that those who reported of having arthritis pain needed only 75 minutes a week of moderate exercise like brisk walking to reduce the frequency of symptoms by nearly 30 percent.

Manage your weight
Both Church’s study and a larger study of 13,711 men and women reveal that just 70 to 75 minutes of brisk walking or about 40 minutes of jogging a week is enough to begin shrinking your waistline. And targeting the waist is important because belly fat is directly tied to heart disease, diabetes, and early death.

Quell stress
“We’ve seen significant changes in the autonomic nervous system fewer incidences of the fight-or-flight stress reflex being triggered with even 70 to 75 minutes a week of exercise,” says Church. “A little exercise can do much more than people think, so there’s no excuse for not getting up and just doing something.”