Paving The Way To Good Health
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This is Dr. Michelle Tollefson. She’s a gynecologist, and a menopause and lifestyle medicine expert. She’s also a breast cancer survivor, and, indeed, thriver.
So, what does she want us to know?
A Multivector Approach To Health
There’s a joke that goes: a man is trapped in a flooding area, and as the floodwaters rise, he gets worried and begins to pray, but he is interrupted when some people come by on a raft and offer him to go with them. He looks at the rickety raft and says “No, you go on, God will spare me”. He returns to his prayer, and is further interrupted by a boat and finally a helicopter, and each time he gives the same response. He drowns, and in the afterlife he asks God “why didn’t you spare me from the flood?”, and God replies “I sent a raft, a boat, and a helicopter; what more did you want?!”
People can be a bit the same when it comes to different approaches to cancer and other serious illness. They are offered chemotherapy and say “No, thank you, eating fruit will spare me”.
Now, this is not to trivialize those who decline aggressive cancer treatments for other reasons such as “I am old and would rather not go through that; I’d rather have a shorter life without chemo than a longer life with it”—for many people that’s a valid choice.
But it is to say: lifestyle medicine is, mostly, complementary medicine.
It can be very powerful! It can make the difference between life and death! Especially when it comes to things like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, etc.
But it’s not a reason to decline powerful medical treatments if/when those are appropriate. For example, in Dr. Tollefson’s case…
Synergistic health
Dr. Tollefson, herself a lifestyle medicine practitioner and gynecologist (and having thus done thousands of clinical breast exams for other people, screening for breast cancer), says she owes her breast cancer survival to two things, or rather two categories of things:
- a whole-food, plant predominant diet, daily physical activity, prioritizing sleep, minimizing stress, and a strong social network
- a bilateral mastectomy, 16 rounds of chemotherapy, removal of her ovaries, and several reconstructive surgeries
Now, one may wonder: if the first thing is so good, why need the second?
Or on the flipside: if the second thing was necessary, what was the point of the first?
And the answer she gives is: the first thing was the reason she was able to make it through the second thing.
And on the next level: the second thing was the reason she’s still around to talk about the first thing.
In other words: she couldn’t have done it with just one or the other.
A lot of medicine in general, and lifestyle medicine in particular, is like this. If we note that such-and-such a thing decreases our risk of cancer mortality by 4%, that’s a small decrease, but it can add up (and compound!) if it’s surrounded by other things that also each decrease the risk by 12%, 8%, 15%, and so on.
Nor is this only confined to cancer, nor only to the positives.
Let’s take cardiovascular disease: if a person smokes, drinks, eats red meat, stresses, and has a wild sleep schedule, you can imagine those risk factors add up and compound.
If this person and another with a heart-healthy lifestyle both have a stroke (it can happen to anyone, even if it’s less likely in this case), and both need treatment, then two things are true:
- They are both still going to need treatment (medicines, and possibly a thrombectomy)
- The second person is most likely to recover, and most likely to recover more quickly and easily
The second person can be said to have paved the way to their recovery, with their lifestyle.
Which is really important, because a lot of people think “what’s the point in living so healthily if [disease] strikes anyway?” and the answer is:
A very large portion of your recovery is predicated on how you lived your life before The Bad Thing™ happened, and that can be the difference between bouncing back quickly and a long struggle back to health.
Or the difference between a long struggle back to health, or a short struggle followed by rapid decline and death.
In short:
Play the odds, improve your chances with lifestyle medicine. Enjoy those cancer-fighting fruits:
Top 8 Fruits That Prevent & Kill Cancer
…but also, get your various bits checked when appropriate; we know, mammograms and prostate checks etc are not usually the highlight of most people’s days, but they save lives. And if it turns out you need serious medical interventions, consider them seriously.
And, by all means, enjoy mood-boosting nutraceuticals such as:
12 Foods That Fight Depression & Anxiety
…but also recognize that sometimes, your brain might have an ongoing biochemical problem that a tablespoon of pumpkin seeds isn’t going to fix.
And absolutely, you can make lifestyle adjustments to reduce the risks associated with menopause, for example:
Menopause, & How Lifestyle Continues To Matter “Postmenopause”
…but also be aware that if the problem is “not enough estrogen”, sometimes to solution is “take estrogen”.
And so on.
Want to know Dr. Tollefson’s lifestyle recommendations?
Most of them will not be a surprise to you, and we mentioned some of them above (a whole-food, plant predominant diet, daily physical activity, prioritizing sleep, minimizing stress, and a strong social network), but for more specific recommendations, including numbers etc, enjoy:
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Take care!
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How To Build a Body That Lasts – by Adam Richardson
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This book is written on a premise, and that premise is: “your age doesn’t define your mobility; your mobility defines your age”.
To this end, we are treated to 328 pages of why and how to improve our mobility (mostly how; just enough on the “why” to keep the motivation flowing).
Importantly, Richardson doesn’t expect that every reader is a regular gym-bunny or about to become one, doesn’t expect you to have several times your bodyweight in iron to life at home, and doesn’t expect that you’ll be doing the vertical splits against a wall any time soon.
Rather, he expects that we’d like to not dislocate a shoulder while putting the groceries away, would like to not slip a disk while being greeted by the neighbor’s dog, and would like to not need a 7-step plan for putting our socks on.
What follows is a guide to “on the good end of normal” mobility that is sustainable for life. The idea is that you might not be winning Olympic gymnastics gold medals in your 90s, but you will be able to get in and out of a car door as comfortably as you did when you were 20, for example.
Bottom line: if you want to be a superathlete, then you might need something more than this book; if you want to be on the healthy end of average when it comes to mobility, and maintain that for the rest of your life, then this is the book for you.
Click here to check out How To Build A Body That Lasts, and build a body that lasts!
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The Dark Side Of Memory (And How To Make Your Life Better)
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How To Stop Revisiting Those Memories
We’ve talked before about putting the brakes on negative thought spirals (and that’s a really useful technique, so if you weren’t with us yet for that one, we do recommend hopping back and reading it!).
We’ve also talked about optimizing memory, to include making moments unforgettable.
But what about the moments we’d rather forget?
First, a quick note: we have no pressing wish or need to re-traumatize any readers, so if you’ve a pressing reason to think your memories you’d rather forget are beyond the scope of a few hundred words “one quick trick” in a newsletter, feel free to skip this section today.
One more quick note: it is generally not considered healthy to repress important memories. Some things are best worked through consciously in therapy with a competent professional.
Today’s technique is more for things in the category of “do you really need to keep remembering that one time you did something embarrassing 20 years ago?”
That said… sometimes, even when it does come to the management of serious PTSD, therapy can (intentionally, reasonably) throw in the towel on processing all of something big, and instead seek to simply look at minimizing its effect on ongoing life. Again, that’s best undertaken with a well-trained professional, however.
For more trivial annoyances, meanwhile…
Two Steps To Forgetting
The first step:
You may remember that memories are tied to the senses, and the more senses are involved, the more easily and fully we remember a thing. To remember something, therefore, we make sure to pay full attention to all the sensory experience of the memory, bringing in all 5 senses if possible.
To forget, the reverse is true. Drain the memory of color, make it black and white, fuzzier, blurrier, smaller, further away, sterile, silent, gone.
You can make a habit of doing this automatically whenever your unwanted memory resurfaces.
The
secondmissing step:This is the second step, but it’s going to be a missing step. Memories, like paths in a forest, are easier to access the more often we access them. A memory we visit every day will have a well-worn path, easy to follow. A memory we haven’t visited for decades will have an overgrown, sometimes nearly impossible-to-find path.
To labor the metaphor a little: if your memory has literal steps leading to it, we’re going to remove one of the steps now, to make it very difficult to access accidentally. Don’t worry, you can always put the step back later if you want to.
Let’s say you want to forget something that happened once upon a time in a certain workplace. Rather than wait for the memory in question to come up, we’re going to apply the first step that we just learned, to the entire workplace.
So, in this example, you’d make the memory of that workplace drained of color, made black and white, fuzzier, blurrier, smaller, further away, sterile, silent, gone.
Then, you’d make a habit of doing that whenever that workplace nearly comes to mind.
The result? You’re unlikely to accidentally access a memory that occurred in that workplace, if even mentally wandering to the workplace itself causes it to shrivel up and disappear like paper in fire.
Important reminder
The above psychological technique is to psychological trauma what painkillers are to physical pain. It can ease the symptom, while masking the cause. If it’s something serious, we recommend enlisting the help of a professional, rather than “self-medicating” in this fashion.
If it’s just a small annoying thing, though, sometimes it’s easier to just be able to refrain from prodding and poking it daily, forget about it, and enjoy life.
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The 7 Known Risk Factors For Dementia
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A recent UK-based survey found that…
- while nearly half of adults say dementia is the disease they fear most,
- only a third of those thought you could do anything to avoid it, and
- just 1% could name the 7 known risk factors.
Quick test
Can you name the 7 known risk factors?
Please take a moment to actually try (this kind of mental stimulation is good in any case), and count them out on your fingers (or write them down), and then…
Answer (no peeking if you haven’t listed them yet)
The 7 known risk factors are:
*drumroll please*
- Smoking
- High blood pressure
- Diabetes
- Obesity
- Depression
- Lack of mental stimulation
- Lack of physical activity
How many did you get? If you got them all, well done. If not, then well, now you know, so that’s good.
Did you come here from our “Future-Proof Your Brain” article? If so, you can get back to it here ← and if you didn’t, you should check it out anyway; it’s worth it😉
Take care!
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Could the shingles vaccine lower your risk of dementia?
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A recent study has suggested Shingrix, a relatively new vaccine given to protect older adults against shingles, may delay the onset of dementia.
This might seem like a bizarre link, but actually, research has previously shown an older version of the shingles vaccine, Zostavax, reduced the risk of dementia.
In this new study, published last week in the journal Nature Medicine, researchers from the United Kingdom found Shingrix delayed dementia onset by 17% compared with Zostavax.
So how did the researchers work this out, and how could a shingles vaccine affect dementia risk?
Melinda Nagy/Shutterstock From Zostavax to Shingrix
Shingles is a viral infection caused by the varicella-zoster virus. It causes painful rashes, and affects older people in particular.
Previously, Zostavax was used to vaccinate against shingles. It was administered as a single shot and provided good protection for about five years.
Shingrix has been developed based on a newer vaccine technology, and is thought to offer stronger and longer-lasting protection. Given in two doses, it’s now the preferred option for shingles vaccination in Australia and elsewhere.
In November 2023, Shingrix replaced Zostavax on the National Immunisation Program, making it available for free to those at highest risk of complications from shingles. This includes all adults aged 65 and over, First Nations people aged 50 and older, and younger adults with certain medical conditions that affect their immune systems.
What the study found
Shingrix was approved by the US Food and Drugs Administration in October 2017. The researchers in the new study used the transition from Zostavax to Shingrix in the United States as an opportunity for research.
They selected 103,837 people who received Zostavax (between October 2014 and September 2017) and compared them with 103,837 people who received Shingrix (between November 2017 and October 2020).
By analysing data from electronic health records, they found people who received Shingrix had a 17% increase in “diagnosis-free time” during the follow-up period (up to six years after vaccination) compared with those who received Zostavax. This was equivalent to an average of 164 extra days without a dementia diagnosis.
The researchers also compared the shingles vaccines to other vaccines: influenza, and a combined vaccine for tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis. Shingrix and Zostavax performed around 14–27% better in lowering the risk of a dementia diagnosis, with Shingrix associated with a greater improvement.
The benefits of Shingrix in terms of dementia risk were significant for both sexes, but more pronounced for women. This is not entirely surprising, because we know women have a higher risk of developing dementia due to interplay of biological factors. These include being more sensitive to certain genetic mutations associated with dementia and hormonal differences.
Why the link?
The idea that vaccination against viral infection can lower the risk of dementia has been around for more than two decades. Associations have been observed between vaccines, such as those for diphtheria, tetanus, polio and influenza, and subsequent dementia risk.
Research has shown Zostavax vaccination can reduce the risk of developing dementia by 20% compared with people who are unvaccinated.
But it may not be that the vaccines themselves protect against dementia. Rather, it may be the resulting lack of viral infection creating this effect. Research indicates bacterial infections in the gut, as well as viral infections, are associated with a higher risk of dementia.
Notably, untreated infections with herpes simplex (herpes) virus – closely related to the varicella-zoster virus that causes shingles – can significantly increase the risk of developing dementia. Research has also shown shingles increases the risk of a later dementia diagnosis.
This isn’t the first time research has suggested a vaccine could reduce dementia risk. ben bryant/Shutterstock The mechanism is not entirely clear. But there are two potential pathways which may help us understand why infections could increase the risk of dementia.
First, certain molecules are produced when a baby is developing in the womb to help with the body’s development. These molecules have the potential to cause inflammation and accelerate ageing, so the production of these molecules is silenced around birth. However, viral infections such as shingles can reactivate the production of these molecules in adult life which could hypothetically lead to dementia.
Second, in Alzheimer’s disease, a specific protein called Amyloid-β go rogue and kill brain cells. Certain proteins produced by viruses such as COVID and bad gut bacteria have the potential to support Amyloid-β in its toxic form. In laboratory conditions, these proteins have been shown to accelerate the onset of dementia.
What does this all mean?
With an ageing population, the burden of dementia is only likely to become greater in the years to come. There’s a lot more we have to learn about the causes of the disease and what we can potentially do to prevent and treat it.
This new study has some limitations. For example, time without a diagnosis doesn’t necessarily mean time without disease. Some people may have underlying disease with delayed diagnosis.
This research indicates Shingrix could have a silent benefit, but it’s too early to suggest we can use antiviral vaccines to prevent dementia.
Overall, we need more research exploring in greater detail how infections are linked with dementia. This will help us understand the root causes of dementia and design potential therapies.
Ibrahim Javed, Enterprise and NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow, UniSA Clinical & Health Sciences, University of South Australia
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Total Fitness After 40 – by Nick Swettenham
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Time may march relentlessly on, but can we retain our youthful good health?
The answer is that we can… to a degree. And where we can’t, we can and should adapt what we do as we age.
The key, as Swettenham illustrates, is that there are lifestyle factors that will help us to age more slowly, thus retaining our youthful good health for longer. At the same time, there are factors of which we must simply be mindful, and take care of ourselves a little differently now than perhaps we did when we were younger. Here, Swettenham acts guide and instructor.
A limitation of the book is that it was written with the assumption that the reader is a man. This does mean that anything relating to hormones is assuming that we have less testosterone as we’re getting older and would like to have more, which is obviously not the case for everyone. However, happily, the actual advice remains applicable regardless.
Swettenham covers the full spread of what he believes everyone should take into account as we age:
- Mindset changes (accepting that physical changes are happening, without throwing our hands in the air and giving up)
- Focus on important aspects such as:
- strength
- flexibility
- mobility
- agility
- endurance
- Some attention is also given to diet—nothing you won’t have read elsewhere, but it’s a worthy mention.
All in all, this is a fine book if you’re thinking of taking up or maintaining an exercise routine that doesn’t stick its head in the sand about your aging body, but doesn’t just roll over and give up either. A worthy addition to anyone’s bookshelf!
Check Out Fitness After 40 On Amazon Today!
Looking for a more women-centric equivalent book? Vonda Wright M.D. has you covered (and her bio is very impressive)!
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The Most Annoying Nutrition Tips (7 Things That Actually Work)
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You can’t out-exercise a bad diet, and getting a good diet can be a challenge depending on your starting point. Here’s Cori Lefkowith’s unglamorous seven-point plan:
Step by step
Seven things to do:
- Start tracking first: track your food intake (as it is, without changing anything) without judgment to identify realistic areas for improvement.
- Add protein: add 10g of protein to three meals daily to improve satiety, aid fat loss, and retain muscle.
- Fiber swaps: swap foods for higher-fiber options where possible to improve gut health, improve heart health, support fat loss, and promote satiety.
- Hydration: take your body weight in kilograms (or half your body weight in pounds), then get that many ounces of water daily to support metabolism and reduce cravings.
- Calorie swaps: replace or reduce calorie-dense foods to create a small, modestly sustainable calorie deficit. Your body will still adjust to this after a while; that’s fine; it’s about a gradual reduction.
- Tweak and adjust: regularly reassess and adjust your diet and habits to fit your lifestyle and progress.
- Guard against complacency: track consistently, and stay on course.
For more on all of these, enjoy:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like:
The Smartest Way To Get To 20% Body Fat (Or 10% For Men)
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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