Natural Way Health Blog

Biomarker 1 – Benefits of good muscle and bone

A strong, toned musculature makes all sorts of wonderful contributions to your overall well-being. A high ratio of muscle to fat on the body:

• 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

Biomarker 4 – Body Fat

The average sedentary 65-year-old woman is about 43 percent “adipose tissue,” the more scientific term for fat. Contrast that with the average 25-year-old woman’s body fat; it hovers around 25 percent. Men, by nature, remain somewhat leaner even as they age. For a man, we see average body fat of 18 percent at age 25, moving up to 38 percent at age 65.

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.

Biomarker 2 – Strength

Here’s the problem:

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.