Physical Exercise Still Beats Mental Workouts For Keeping The Brain In Top Form

'Regular physical exercise appears to trump mental memory games when it comes to protecting the brain from shrinking, an otherwise natural process that occurs with age. Conversely, mentally and socially stimulating activities, long believed to stimulate the brain, had no major effect on preventing brain shrinkage, according to a study published in the journal Neurology.'

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"People in their seventies who participated in more physical exercise, including walking several times a week, had less brain shrinkage and other signs of aging in the brain than those who were less physically active," said lead author Alan J. Gow of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. "On the other hand, our study showed no real benefit to participating in mentally and socially stimulating activities on brain size, as seen on MRI scans, over the three-year time frame."

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These Simple Lifestyle Changes Will Add a Decade or More To Your Life

 

'Health prevention strategies to help people achieve their optimal health potential could add a decade or more of healthy years to the average lifespan and save the economy billions of dollars as a result of reduced cardiovascular disease.

Professor of medicine and chief cardiologist at the Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. Dr. Clyde Yancy stated that "achieving...simple lifestyle factors gives people a 90 per cent chance of living to the age of 90 or 100, free of not only heart disease and stroke but from a number of other chronic illnesses including cancer." '

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Staying Young Forever

'Our culture places great value on staying and looking young and a huge industry is in place to give people the opportunity to live longer. Anti-aging enthusiasts contend that life spans can be prolonged. Advice from the National Institute on Aging is to be a skeptical consumer on guard for possible scams involving purported anti-aging products. 

“Our culture places great value on staying young, but aging is normal,” the Institute says. “Despite claims about pills or treatments that lead to endless youth, no treatments have been proven to slow or reverse the aging process.”' 

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Creative Aging

by Deepak Chopra

Psychologists who study creativity say that artists and writers often can produce more new ideas in their sixties or seventies than in their twenties. One interesting variable is that the later you take up any creative pursuit, the more likely you are to pursue it into old age.

Creative experience may enhance the structure of the brain itself. Chinese studies of old people in Shanghai indicate that less educated people have higher rates of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease; the implication is that educated people, having been trained to use their minds, stimulate healthy brain activity.

PET scans show increased blood flow to the brain during periods of creative thought; a distinctive EEG of coherent rhythms across all bands of brainwave activity is associated with the “Aha!” or “Eureka!” experience that characterizes art and creativity in general.

Also, it’s a myth to think that it harms the brain to get too wrapped up in mental work. As long as it is enjoyable, concentrated mental activity gives rise to alpha-wave patterns typical of “restful alertness,” the relaxed but aware state also found in meditation.

Certain desirable neurotransmitters such as serotonin also increase during pleasurable creative activities. The neurological picture is still debatable, but the real-life results – more years of fulfilling existence–are not.

It would appear, then, that to want as much life, creativity, and wisdom as possible is very desirable. If your expectations in these areas are low, you are not likely to exceed them, while setting very high standards makes every decade worth looking forward to.

Beyond any body of evidence about aging and how to prevent it, the single most important factor is that you make something creative from your existence.

Adapted from Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, by Deepak Chopra (Three Rivers Press, 1998).

Source:Care2

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Science Finally Reveals How You Can Actually REVERSE Aging

Posted by: Dr. Mercola




'In November 2009, I had the privilege of attending a gathering of some of the leading anti-aging biologists and experts in the world.

In the video above, Bill Andrews, PhD and CEO of Sierra Sciences explains what telomeres are, and how extending telomeres may be able to alter the human aging process as we know it. I actually had the chance to have lunch with Dr. Andrews right after his lecture to ask him for more details about it.

Many anti aging experts agree that this approach is, without question, one of the most exciting methods that holds great promise to actually REVERSE aging.'


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Meditation and Telomeres

How Does Meditation Slow Aging?

'The healing power of meditation does not confine itself to only spiritual and emotional benefits. Over the years, one eminent effect of meditation was its ability to slow aging. How? Through the fortification of the telomere.

You might now be asking yourself what is a telomere. Telomeres are the ends of a person’s chromosomes that determine life’s longevity. Research has proven that meditation reinforces and strengthens a person’s telomeres therefore prolonging the age of one’s cells. Healthy cells mean healthy living and longer life.'

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