100-year Health Span

With proper planning, diversification, and sound strategies, nowadays we can all greatly increase our possibility of enjoying 100 or more fully functional, vibrant and robust years of health.

And naturally, it is better you start as early as possible.

Hence, following are the "Five Steps to the 100 Year Health Span".

Before we start, I wish to clarify that my goal here is, as quoted by a famous doctor, is to "die young...at a ripe old age!"

The "Five Steps"

1. Cultivate and inculcate healthy attitudes, healthy activities and healthy alimentary habits!

2. Keeping moderation in mind, endeavor to minimize exposure to oxidants and toxicants, while optimizing antioxidant and detoxicant intake.

3. Endeavor to keep the "Hormones of Age", insulin and cortisol, under control.

4. Endeavor to maintain the " Hormones of Youth" at optimum levels. These include human growth hormone, melatonin, thymosins, thyroid (and perhaps parathyroid) hormone, and the steroid hormones pregnenolone, DHEA, progesterone, testosterone and the estrogens.

5. Reviewing as best you can your historical lifestyle and genetic risk factors, your likely weak points with a specific strategy. For example, do lifetime habits and exposures and/or genetic tendency strongly predilect you to heart disease, diabetes, dementia, or cancer? Have they perhaps already shown themselves to one extant or the other? Than take preventative action specific to said threat in addition to the four steps above.

These steps might be visualized as steps along a pyramid. By this I means that each step is best built upon the foundation of the previous more basic and foundational step. The best way to build your own "pyramid of health" is to build the foundation first, and then proceed one step at a time, in order.

Step One: Ha-Ha-Hah!

"The more you cover the basics, the less you need of anything else."

The above quote of Rick Armstrong, heavyweight kickboxing champion, was oft repeated to his students. It is just a applicable here.

The primacy of healthy attitude is perhaps best argues by Lynn Peters Adler, J.D, author of "Centenarians: The Bonus Years".

Many of the centenarians have the following five traits, attitudes, behaviors or as some would say, personalities:

A love of life. A positive, yet realistic attitude. The courage & willingness to use modern medical interventions when needed. A spiritual or religious belief. And a remarkable ability to renegotiate life at every turn adjusting to and accepting the inevitable losses that come with longevity.

Healthy activity encompasses not only physical activity, but mental activity (left and right brain), social activity and spiritual activity.

Physical activities should be varied and promote strength, flexibility, endurance and balance.

Social activity is always essential to robust health, particularly as you begin to outlive your family and friends. We must commit ourselves to constantly building and re-building close meaningful relationships.

Healthy alimentary habits refers to what we eat and drink, the alimentary canal being that tube that begins at our lips and ends at our anuses. Whether famous the diet may be, the core essentials are more or less the same; eating smaller, frequent, and varied minimally processed of mostly plant based meals. And lots of pure fresh water!

It is of interest to note that the latest "diet" of interest is the Okinawan diet, a low-calorie diet abundant in soy, vegetables and fish is being credited for the fact.

It has been said that "laughter is the best medicine". So let me encourage you to take the first step and start, "ha-ha-hah-ing" your way to a 100 year health- span today!