You: Staying Young: Make Your RealAge Younger and Live Up to 35% Longer. Michael Roizen F.
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YOU Tip: Go with the Flow. Your blood feeds your brain nutrients. No nutrients, no brain. No brain, no birthday party this year. So one of your big goals should be to keep your arteries clear and flowing (details in the next chapter). Reducing high blood pressure to normal improves cognitive function and slows Alzheimer’s progression substantially. If you have a diastolic blood pressure of over 90 (that’s the bottom number), then you have a five times greater risk of getting dementia two decades down the line than if it’s below 90. If you have elevated blood pressure, it may be because your arteries are constricted, often as a result of cholesterol plaques, and limit the amount of blood and nutrients that reach a particular area. In the case of the brain, not having sufficient blood supplied to that watershed area between the two main arteries is what elevates the risk of stroke. We’ll offer tips for reducing blood pressure and cholesterol plaques in the next chapter.
YOU Tip: Consider Your Hormonal Options. Early research on menopausal women showed that boosting oestrogen levels delays Alzheimer’s. Newer research is less clear, so we don’t believe that’s reason enough to start taking oestrogen. But if you’re considering taking it for other reasons, it could be one additional positive factor. See our complete thoughts on oestrogen here.
YOU Tip: Get into the Game. It’s no surprise that exercise is good for your heart as well as for your modelling career, but it’s also an elixir for your mind. It seems that more intense exercise preserves neurocognitive function by decreasing the expression of the Apo-E4 gene to help clear the beta-amyloid plaque that gunks up your power lines. Exercise has also been correlated with increased telomere length. Our suggestion for a brain-boosting workout: once or twice a week, choose an exercise that requires not only your body to work but also your mind, such as Bikram yoga or a game of singles tennis. The sports or exercises that engage you in the moment can really help clear your mind at the same time. You don’t need to overdo it. Just thirty minutes of walking a day plus our YOU2 Workout a couple of times a week will help you burn the 2,000 to 3,500 calories a week – the amount shown to increase telomere length.
YOU Tip: Detox Your Life. If you know the original story of the mad hatters, you’re familiar with how they got their name. Workers in hat factories were exposed to a lot of mercury when moulding felt for the hats, and they eventually turned crazier than an unneutered pit bull. This historical nugget illuminates how toxins in our environment can have a profound influence on our mind and memory. If you’re experiencing memory problems that are causing you alarm, eliminate some key chemicals from your lifestyle first, before adding anything new. That includes such things as artificial foods (like sweeteners), MSG and even shampoo (better to make sure the inside of your head is clean, isn’t it?). Finally, despite their lifesaving benefits, statin drugs can uncommonly cause reversible memory loss, a discussion that you should pursue with your doctor if you are more concerned about your memory than your heart. Surprising titbit: even over-the-counter cold and allergy medications can contribute to memory problems; in fact, injecting lab animals with the active ingredient in Benadryl (diphenhydramine) is a research model for memory loss that immediately simulates Alzheimer’s.
YOU Tip: Learn to Tell a Joke. There’s lots of evidence that a good laugh can help improve your immune system, and humour can also have a valuable effect on your memory. Humour requires what the laugh doctors call conceptual blending – that is, the ability to relate the expected to the unexpected; we laugh when something surprising happens. Having a sense of humour is a sign of intelligence. Telling a joke, like being a teacher, is another way to challenge your brain. You have to be able to play mental hopscotch from one word to another to make sure that the story, joke, riddle or pun combines a set of expected circumstances and unexpected ones (in other words, what happens once the man walks into the bar?). And ultimately, if you tell it right, you have to have a fair amount of social intelligence as well – the ability to maximize the tension and mystery of the joke until the very last second.
YOU Tip: Map Your Mind. One way to strengthen your mind is by flexing parts that you don’t use often – like perhaps those associated with imagination. So try this trick from our friend psychologist Tony Buzan the next time you’re feeling overwhelmed by a task (see Figure 1.4). Map out your to-do list rather than actually listing it. That is, draw a picture of your issue in the middle of a piece of paper, then branch out from that centrepiece with smaller subsections and keywords related to that issue. For example, if you want to lose 25 pounds, draw a picture of yourself on a scale in the middle. Instead of making a list of ways to do it, draw lines from the centre to things like food, exercise, pitfalls, supports and other broad categories that will help you. Then branch out from there with subcategories (food may include such branches as “Eat breakfast”, “Eat five small meals a day”, and “No more doughnuts”). Why is this helpful? For one thing, starting in the centre gives your brain freedom to spread out in different directions; for another, a picture flexes your imagination muscles and also keeps you focused and able to concentrate better. And the branches work because your brain works by association. Connect the branches, and you will understand, remember and act on the problem much more easily.
Figure 1.4 Mind Map Mind maps, developed by Tony Buzan, exercise the brain better than lists; creative and novel decisions make new pathways in the brain.
YOU Test: Quick Thinker
Figure 1.5 Score! Connect the dots in the sample test without lifting your pencil and using straight lines (just go through numbers that are in the way). In the first test, connect all the numbers in order. In the second, move from 1 to A, A to 2, 2 to B and so on. Race the clock to determine your physiological brain age. Get someone else to time you, and add up your times on both tests to determine how your mental acuity ranks against others your age.
When you live the kind of life so many of us do – having a job and a family, and running around like a preschooler high on E numbers – someone’s bound to ask you where you get all that energy. Instead of answering with a laugh, a thank-you, a shrug or “More Snickers than I should,” do your part to increase the biological IQ of our society.
Tell them that your body gets its energy from the same place theirs does: from mitochondria.
We know you remember (perhaps vaguely) mitochondria from school biology lessons, but we don’t expect that you remember all that much about what mitochrondria do and why they’re important.
Think back before iTunes, even before eight-tracks and well before our ancestors made music by banging rocks. That’s the time when mitochondria used to be independent single-celled organisms – essentially parasites that lived symbiotically with their host. But at some point in our evolution, they were swallowed by our normal cells, thus becoming a part of every cell rather than existing on their own.
Mitochondria (you have hundreds of those per cell) convert nutrients from the food you eat into energy that your body uses in order to perform all of the functions it needs to. They are the fundamental drivers of metabolism. They make sure that what you eat fits into how you perform. Plus, their function (and dysfunction) serves as the backbone for one of the major theories of ageing.
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