The Longevity Code: Your Personal Prescription for a Longer, Sweeter Life - Hardcover

Paster, Zorba, M.D.; Meltsner, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0609603604 ISBN 13: 9780609603604

Verlag: Clarkson Potter, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

Offers practical advice on how to promote a longer, healthier life, from eliminating unhealthy behaviors--including smoking and not getting enough sleep--to promoting those things that can make life more vital, active, and fulfilling.

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DR. ZORBA PASTER, a clinical professor at the University of Wisconsin Medical School and a Fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians, has practiced family medicine for more than twenty years at the Dean Medical Center. His weekly call-in radio program, Zorba Paster On Your Health, airs in more than one hundred markets. He appears regularly on CBS-affiliate WISC-TV in Madison, Wisconsin, in his Doctor on Call spot and is also the editor of TopHealth, a national newsletter. Dr. Paster lectures extensively throughout the country and internationally on health and wellness. He lives in Wisconsin with his wife, Penelope.<br><br>SUSAN MELTSNER is the author or coauthor of more than a dozen books, including <b>Hidden Agendas: What's Really Going On in Your Relation-ship</b>s, and has contributed to <i>Cosmopoli

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terested in living a long life, but few of us are willing to sacrifice everything to attain that longevity. After all, what good is living an additional decade at the expense of enjoying the previous ones?<br><br>In this remarkable book, Dr. Zorba Paster -- host of the public radio show<b> </b>Zorba Paster On Your Health -- takes a detour from the traditional negative, abstinent approach that addresses only physical factors. Instead, Dr. Zorba introduces us to the five "spheres of wellness" that encompass all aspects of life: the physical, of course, but also the mental, kinship/social, spiritual, and material spheres. He reveals well-documented research that indicates that you must address and balance all of these areas, and not just the physical, to achieve optimal longevity -- and also your greatest enjoyment of that longevity.<br><br>Within each sphere, Dr. Zorba pinpoints the most threatening "busters" -- those lifestyle aspects that will, sooner or later, ki

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From Chapter 1, How We Age Today

Can We All Live to One Hundred?

One-hundred-year-old Alex Hardy grows fresh herbs and glorious perennials in the window boxes of the cottage he shares with his "child bride," Eleanor, a mere youngster at eighty-three. I often see the two of them out for a stroll on warm summer evenings, and I miss them when they head south to Arizona each November. By March I find myself wondering if Alex made it through another winter. But then I drive past his home, spot new seedlings beginning to sprout in his window boxes, and smile. My friend is alive -- and still well enough to continue doing what he loves most.

Alex is one of a dozen or so centenarians I've had the good fortune to know. Another is Betty Ellis. At 102 she is by far the oldest of my patients, and a true original. A farmer's daughter who became a farmer's wife, Betty raised five children before she and her husband, Ed, sold their farm and opened a restaurant, which she ran right along with him until 1951. That's when Ed, who was twenty years her senior, died. Betty kept the restaurant going and did most of the cooking for another thirty-plus years. At seventy-five, she sold the place to her nephew but hardly retired. She cooked for and took care of "old folks" (many of them a decade or more younger than she) for the next seventeen years.

With her hundredth birthday approaching, Betty briefly considered moving into an assisted-living facility, but not because her ability to handle the tasks of daily living was slipping away. No, Betty was simply tired of cooking. She wanted her meals prepared for her for a change. "Only their food was terrible," Betty grumbled. "And the time went too slowly." So she took a room in the home of a local minister and was soon supervising food preparation for his church's soup kitchen. As of this writing, she's still at it and showing few signs of slowing down.

While Alex and Betty are casual acquaintances, I've known Emma Axelrod my entire life. Hers is the name that conjures the most fondness when I think of people who have lived a long, long time.

Emma was eight when her family came to this country from Russia. They landed on Ellis Island, then traveled by train to Chicago, where they lived with relatives until they found a place of their own. It was a fairly typical immigrant story, one that played itself out again and again as each new wave of Emma's family arrived in the region.

Despite being a bright girl who did well in school, Emma dropped out at thirteen to help support a household nearly bursting at the seams with hopeful relatives. She went to work in a spice factory putting peppercorns in little boxes for fancy shops to sell to wealthy women. Although she sometimes peered into those shops, feeling a mixture of awe and envy, she would not have traded her life for anybody else''s. "A little hard work never hurt anyone" are words that Emma lives by. As far as she was concerned, the key to happiness was to "keep busy."

A real beauty, young Emma modeled for magazine advertisements until 1917, when she married Harry Axelrod -- and continued to keep busy. Emma "helped out" with her husband's carpet business and devoted herself to raising her son and daughter, "100 percent American." All three predeceased her, and each death was a tremendous blow. But Emma coped by involving herself in other people's lives. She filled her days by "doing this and that" for her synagogue, visiting shut-ins, chatting with neighbors, organizing card parties at the senior center, and calling in to radio talk shows.

At eighty she was as sharp and spry as any sixty-year-old, and at ninety-five she was still living on her own in a meticulously maintained apartment. But at ninety-eight she broke her hip, was hospitalized, then was transferred to a rehabilitation facility, where the staff determined that she was no longer able to function safely in an apartment.

Reluctantly she moved to a nursing home, a very nice place where residents are treated with grace and dignity, but still a regimented institution with fixed schedules, preset menus, and minimal freedom of choice. The very idea made Emma profoundly unhappy. But after a brief adjustment period, she has found that she likes the place.

In the nursing home she has a roommate to talk to. The nurses are pleasant, and the afternoons spent conversing with fellow residents or reminiscing with visitors are a joy. Indeed, being back in a social milieu has been a real longevity booster for Emma, who celebrated her hundredth birthday in 1997. Surrounded by friends and family and looking as if she would be around for at least another decade, she joined the exclusive club consisting of the world's longest-living men and women.

What's the secret to Alex's, Betty's, and Emma's longevity? Why have they lived for more than a century while more than 99 percent of their peers died at sixty or seventy or eighty-four? Did they have a genetic advantage, a better upbringing, healthier lifestyles, an exceptional outlook? Was it just a matter of chance? Or all of the above?

Longer and Better -- The Story of Our Lives Today

For centuries we humans have been fascinated with the idea of immortality and driven by the desire to stay young indefinitely. Countless quests have been fueled by the hope of finding the mythical fountain of youth whose waters were purported to make the old young again.

Over the years we've also tried to locate a "cure" for aging in various foods, drinks, minerals, lotions, potions, injections, and incantations. Thus far no magical elixir has been discovered, although biologists, sociologists, and other scientists have accumulated an impressive -- and still expanding -- body of knowledge. We now know a lot about how people age, what kills us prematurely, and how to prevent or avoid those killers, which substances and behaviors undermine health and which promote it. While this may not be enough know-how to put a lifetime of one hundred within everyone's grasp, I believe it gives most of us a chance to reach our nineties.

We're already living longer than any generation that came before us. Since the start of the twentieth century, average life expectancy in this country has climbed from forty-nine to seventy-six. The number of people surviving to one hundred or older (one out of every ten thousand Americans) has increased fivefold during that same period and is expected to triple again by the year 2020. Naturally, the ranks of men and women in their eighties and nineties have swollen, too, and those octogenarians and nonagenarians tend to be healthier and to do more for longer than they've ever done before. Active life expectancy -- the number of years people remain in a vital, independent state?is on the rise.

Today, athletes run marathons well into their seventies. Grandmothers graduate from college. Downsized employees in their forties, fifties, and sixties start their own businesses. Senator and former astronaut John Glenn returned to space as a septuagenarian. The late comedian George Burns continued to perform long past his ninetieth birthday.

And in Arles, France, Jeanne Calumet was still living in her own apartment at 110. She rode a bicycle and handled all daily living activities independently until her 115th year and might have gone on longer if she had not injured herself in a fall. When she died in August 1997 at the age of 122, she had lived longer than any person on record.

Some of these folks are exceptional individuals, having been trendsetters and fearless adventurers since childhood or recipients of remarkable genetic heritages. But most are everyday folks, more like us than not. They simply do not treat getting older as if it were a one-way...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Clarkson Potter
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0609603604
• ISBN 13: 9780609603604
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 349
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: QE GmbH & Co. KG; info@averdo.de; ; Martinistraße 3; Osnabrück; Deutschland