Breaking the Age Barrier - 038

SPEAKER A The following program presents principles designed to promote good health and is not intended to take the place of personalised, professional care. The opinions and ideas expressed are those of the speakers. Viewers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions about the information presented. Welcome to healthy living. I'm your host, Margot Marshall. Every hour, five men die before their time in Australia from potentially preventable illnesses, and women aren't far behind. Stay tuned. SPEAKER B Healthy Living is a production of 3ABN Australia television focusing on the health of the whole person body, mind, and spirit. You'll learn natural lifestyle principles with practical health solutions for overall good health. SPEAKER A How can we break the cycle of premature death and enjoy a long and healthy life? We are privileged today to learn life saving advice from a medical doctor who specializes in what is called lifestyle medicine. Welcome, Dr. John Clark. SPEAKER C Thank you. SPEAKER A And let me ask you, does long life longevity run in your family? SPEAKER C You know, my grandmother lived 30 years longer than her parents lived. SPEAKER A That's amazing. That's a lot of years. SPEAKER C 30 years longer. SPEAKER A It's almost half a lifetime. SPEAKER C Yes. SPEAKER A Wow. SPEAKER C A lot of time there. And she was a very active lady. We enjoyed going to visit her. She would come to visit us. She was very involved in our lives. When she came to our house, she often liked to get involved in projects. Let's paint that room. Let's put up wallpaper. SPEAKER A Oh, really? SPEAKER C Or let's go down and visit the zoo. And when we went to her house, it was always an opportunity to go see some of her friends. Oftentimes her friends were people who were shut in that needed friends, and she would make them. You might think of it as a ministry, but she enjoyed it and went to see them. She was very active in her church and enjoyed the Bible lessons. She was very active in art. She was a painter wow. And painted many, many pieces that are even hanging on my mom's walls today. And so she was a very active lady. She was a person who was known to eat very little food. We said she ate like a bird. SPEAKER A Okay. SPEAKER C And that was interesting. And also her diet was vegetarian, which was different than her parents. SPEAKER A Right. So a lot of differences there then. Does that sort of wrap up your grandmother's and what she did and how she lived? SPEAKER C She had a lot of friends also, that were like other people's families, the same age as we were. So sometimes we'd get together with them. And she enjoyed reading, doing puzzles. And she one time I was overseas, she decided she'd come and travel back with me. We stopped in Hawai, toured all around Hawai, and she had learned about the places and picked out the places we need to go visit. She was very understanding of what the geography was like and where she wanted to go. SPEAKER A That's fantastic. Something's just coming together. In my mind here, it seems to me as though your grandmother lived and fulfilled the four fundamental elements required for health, which happen to be the ones that are recorded in the Bible about Jesus. Now, when he was twelve at the temple, the next time we hear about him, he's around 30, beginning his ministry. So in those, what, 18 years, the only record that we have of his life is it's found in Luke 252, and it says, and Jesus increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and men. And that's really, when you think about it, wisdom is mental and in stature, that's physical, and in favor with God is spiritual, and in favor with men is social. So those three elements are actually recognized by the World Health Organization? The three of them are, and in 2003 they were considering spiritual. I think they're still working it out, but it's not surprising because over the last hundred years there's been something like more than 1200 studies showing the health benefits from spirituality. So it's a very, very well rounded approach to health. So I think that might have something to do with her added years, all of those elements, because when you put them all together, it's like a synergy effect where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. So I think that could just be possible. SPEAKER C Yes, indeed, yes. And that's a good point. We like to be well rounded, and maybe the more balanced we are, the longer we live. And you think about the social aspect, she spent time with us, her family and my mom's other brothers that she would go visit. And she was very involved in family. She liked to help others, especially people who couldn't get out. Yes, invalids. We would go visit a number of invalids that had become very good friends of hers. She liked giving gifts. That was one of her, maybe we'd say it was one of her love languages. Yes, giving gifts and sharing with others. And she enjoyed painting pictures, which is but she would share those pictures with other people. They were often as gifts to be given away. And all her friends, some of them were people her age, and some of them were with families. Just like her spiritually, she enjoyed family worship. So whenever we went to her house, we would have family worship morning and evening, a little prayer, Bible study and sharing. And she also enjoyed studying her lessons for church, Sabbath school lessons, which kept her very active. And she's one of those people that she sort of instilled in us a moral consciousness, what was right and what was wrong. And I remember her making some comments sometimes about people who didn't have quite that moral consciousness as older people can mentally. She was very acute. She had been a schoolteacher, she had been a nurse, and also she was running a trailer court. A lot of business sense a piece of land that had a lot of mobile homes on it that were either people owned them or they were oh. SPEAKER A She was very involved in life, wasn't she? I mean, that's not a small thing to do. That's like running a small business, isn't it? SPEAKER C Yes, definitely running a small business. And this thing of her living 30 years longer than her parents, I mean, this is, like, phenomenal. There's a lot of emphasis put on genetics these days. Do you have this gene and therefore will you get cancer? Do you have this gene, therefore, that explains why you're so OD or whatever? It keeps the research dollars rolling. But we've also learned that you aren't stuck with your genes. I mean, obviously she lives 30 years longer than her gene pool says she should. And so I've had people tell me, yeah, I'm 56, but my brother died at 54 of a heart attack, and my sister died at 58 of cancer. And there's just no hope for me. I mean, I'm in my last few years, and yet here my grandmother lived 30 years longer. And it comes down to something we've discovered. It's called epigenetics EPA, meaning above or overshadowing or more powerful than genetics. And the discoveries have been that you can control your genes, believe it or not. I mean, I don't think you can probably change the color of your hair, but it's oh, you might be surprised. SPEAKER A Or your eyes. SPEAKER C And what happens is, as you change your lifestyle, your genes turn on or off. We all basically have very similar genes. I mean, they've done the Human Genome Project where they mapped out the genes of everybody. They didn't get any DNA from me to figure it out, yet they say my genes are like that's because everybody's genes are about the same. What differs is which genes are turned on and which genes are turned off out of the big pool of genes that you have. And so lifestyle changes, lifestyle modification has been seen or has scientifically worked out to be the greatest force for genetic manipulation. SPEAKER A Yes. The US. Surgeon General said that. He said it accounts for 70% of our health status. Sorry to say this, Doctor, but medical care was only ten, genetics, ten and environmental factors ten. So lifestyle, according to the US Surgeon General back in five, I think it was, accounts for more than all of those put together. SPEAKER C He was right on. SPEAKER A He was right on. SPEAKER C He was right with. Yes, that's for sure. And so one of the ways we think about genetics is, yeah, you inherit things from your parents, some genes, but you also inherit their lifestyle. My grandmother cooked certain things that we liked. Yes. And my mom would try to repeat the same recipe with not quite the same results, and then if I try it, it might be even different. But the idea is, though, we were trying because we liked what grandma made. And a lot of families eat the same way their families ate, and so they die the same way their families died. And it didn't have anything to do with what was in the DNA, had everything to do with what was in the oven. SPEAKER A Right. And ends up in the mouth. In the mouth, yeah, that's right. SPEAKER C The other thing about my grandmother that I mentioned was that she ate very little. Now, the Okinawans are known for that. The Okinawans eat 30% less food than the average American, and yet they live longer. SPEAKER A Be difficult. SPEAKER C It wouldn't be difficult. SPEAKER A No, but still, it's a good thing. SPEAKER C Yeah. So the Okinawans have 75% less cancers, 75% less Alzheimer's. They live about eight years longer. That doesn't account for 30 years longer, but eight years longer. And so it makes a difference, eating less food. There's a lot of studies on mice where they took a bunch of mice and they let them eat how much they wanted to eat. That became the standard. And then they fed the next group of mice 30% less food. SPEAKER A Was that the next generation? SPEAKER C Yeah, next generation. They lived 30% longer then the next generation. They fed them 60% less food, they lived 60% longer. I mean, there's an end. SPEAKER A It's got to be an entity somewhere. SPEAKER C Yes, but the idea is eating less food, so you're not overwhelming the system, not eating so much food that your stomach is like a big ball full of food. It's keeping the stomach happy with how much it's eating, not overloading the system. When you eat too much, you overload the system with oxidants, with metabolic byproducts that aren't being gotten rid of. And so eating less is definitely part of living longer. And then the vegetarian diet. I mean, in our day and age, we know the benefits of a vegetarian diet. I mean, if you're going to avoid cancer, you don't go eating meat. Anybody's eating meat just once will have a higher risk of cancer because they've loaded their body with the viruses in meat. One study out of California showed that two thirds of women with breast cancer had viruses from cattle, from milk in their breasts associated with the cancer. I mean, it makes sense. You're eating something from a cow's breast, you might get a breast disease, and here it is, cancer. So animal products are going to give you less longevity. And my grandmother then became vegetarian, avoiding these things. Not all her life, actually. When she grew up, she grew up on a dairy farm. But later in life, she adopted more of a vegetarian lifestyle and something her parents never did. And one of the reasons why they probably died short of maybe their genetic potential. SPEAKER A I think your grandmother had a lot of things going for her. It wasn't just eating less. That was a huge thing, obviously, from the study that you've just shared. And then the diet that she changed to I think she probably had a whole bunch of things going for her, not just in the four categories that we talked about, but within those categories, subcategories. I think she did really well. SPEAKER C And one of the things she always did is she always had a dog. SPEAKER A Okay. SPEAKER C And of the dog, she always liked poodles. SPEAKER A Okay. SPEAKER C And they're sort of high strung, and they need a walk pretty often. And so we were always going with her on a walk to take the dog for a walk, and she made it clear that that was very necessary. We never missed a walk with the dog. SPEAKER A And look, they've even said that pets are very therapeutic, too. SPEAKER C That's right. SPEAKER A And so that would have been a double added benefit. Yes. SPEAKER C Right. And she raised poodles. SPEAKER A Did she do anything else? Painting and running a caravan park or whatever it was, and breeding dogs. SPEAKER C Oh, yes. She was in all kinds very involved. SPEAKER A In life, wasn't she? SPEAKER C She sewed and she crocheted. SPEAKER A Okay. SPEAKER C And she raised betas, these Chinese fighting fish, or Bettas. Wow. And so the living room was full of fish aquariums at one time. SPEAKER A Okay. SPEAKER C Probably, I would guess, 30 of them. And she was also raising little brine shrimp to feed them and all kinds of things. So being active, having interests. SPEAKER A Yes. SPEAKER C A lot of times when I counsel people, I'll ask them, so what are your goals in life? If they don't have any goals in life, I mean, no purpose for living. It's hard to counsel them to make changes in their lifestyle. It's like, why would I change my lifestyle? I don't have a purpose anyway. SPEAKER A I think I heard an expression once, he who aims at nothing will surely hit the target. SPEAKER C That's true. And so she had a lot of goals that were beneficial. But back to the vegetarian thing. I mean, there's a whole vegetarian congress that happens every five years, and they go over the latest data on different diseases. And most of the diseases improve on a vegetarian diet. SPEAKER A Yes, they do. SPEAKER C Including the psychological diseases and the craziness that drives everybody and keeps the world going in a wobble. The thing about helping others, taking care of shut ins, visiting them, it's been studied a lot. People who volunteer live longer, they have less mortality, they end up with fewer things like high blood pressure. People who volunteer for, like even the fire department, when you're giving of your time, giving of your services, making things available to others without expecting huge returns yes. It's not a commercial interest, it's a helping interest. They benefit greatly. It's back to that text. It's more blessed to give them to receive. SPEAKER A And it's a literally true thing. It's a demonstrated fact. SPEAKER C One of the aspects about this activity, keeping moving, walking the dog, is that if you keep moving, keep wiggling, they won't put you in a box. SPEAKER A Oh, dear. Okay, well, keep that in mind. SPEAKER C Also with the activity of the brain. When you're thinking about Bible study and doing your lessons for church people who study the Bible, their brains are more acute. It raises their intelligence. It helps their memory. Even beyond just memorizing scripture. The idea of comparing thought with thought, the idea of making sure that everything seems sensible, god says, Come now, let us reason together. And so the reasoning process is in looking at different Bible texts. And so my grandmother did a lot of that. And this thing of keeping your mind active is one way of staving off Alzheimer's. SPEAKER A Yes. SPEAKER C I don't know that my grandmother ever showed signs of Alzheimer's. She was always very chipper with it mentally. And that reminds me of my wife's great grandmother. We used to go visit. She was 103. SPEAKER A That's a good age. A really good age. 103. SPEAKER C Very old. She was talking about where she grew up. We asked her, Where did you grow up? She says, I grew up down in southwestern Oklahoma. Right away. I thought of oh, I've been there. I said, how far is that from Lotton? Oh. She says, that was about this many miles. From there. In order to get to lawton, you had to go through this town and that town. This is something from very early in her life. And so she was very acute mentally. We asked her, how do you stay so acute mentally? She says, I read two books a week. SPEAKER A Two books a week? SPEAKER C Two books a week. SPEAKER A Wow. Yes, she certainly did have all of those bases covered, didn't she? SPEAKER C And every time we went to visit her, she would have several people there. She was socially active, whether it was relatives. Sometimes it was grandchildren or children. SPEAKER A How lovely. SPEAKER C Sometimes it was other people. SPEAKER A I'd like a grandmother like that. Actually. I did have a grandmother like that. It's very, very special. I still think of her often. Very often. It's surprising how often. SPEAKER C Yes. I don't know that she was that physically active. When we think of physically active, have you ever heard of Jack Lalaine? SPEAKER A No, but she walked the dog a couple of times a day. SPEAKER C Didn't so well, this is my wife's. SPEAKER A Sorry, sorry. This is Julie's. SPEAKER C Yeah, she wasn't quite as active physically. I think she had a little arthritis and so forth. But activity wise, Jack Lalane is a famous person from America. I mean, people older than I talk about seeing him on TV and doing exercises with him. And he lived into his mid 90s. He worked out 2 hours a day, 1 hour with weights, and 1 hour in an exercise swimming pool. And he had some very interesting health secrets he would share with people. One was, if it tastes good, spit it out. SPEAKER A I don't agree with that. I really do not agree with that. Because the good Lord has made some absolutely delicious foods. SPEAKER C Right. SPEAKER A I know what he means. SPEAKER C Playing on your taste and whether you have a perverted appetite or not. The other one was, if man made it, don't eat it. SPEAKER A Well, I'd go with that. Yes. We really messed up the food supply quite a bit, haven't we? SPEAKER C Oh, yes. SPEAKER A There's so many products on the shelf now that never existed decades ago. They've multiplied out of sight and they're just very strange. Concoctions, which aren't always that good for. SPEAKER C Us, come in boxes and have lots of ingredients and right. Have been sitting on the shelf a while and probably oxidized. Now, back to the activity idea. When people are more active, they live longer. This was a study done by Harvard on its own alumni, which they keep track of, and they discovered that the number one predictor of longevity was activity level. SPEAKER A Right. SPEAKER C And so the more active people remain, it helps to have an active, healthy body to support an active, healthy brain. SPEAKER A Well, action is really a law of our being, isn't it? SPEAKER C Yes. The other part of this social aspect is people who are withdrawn, people who keep to themselves, people who don't like social interaction don't live as long. SPEAKER A No. SPEAKER C I was at my medical school listening to some researchers give their data. This one researcher had done his research in the neighboring town to where the medical school was, and one of the things he did is he went door to door and he kept track of his results because he was going to come back years later and do the same thing at the same doors. And he would have an interview with these people about their health, their lifestyle habits. And one of the comments he made that I found very interesting was that when he went to the doors, if they yelled at him and slammed the door in his face and then he came back seven years later, most of those people were either very sick or not even alive anymore. SPEAKER A Very interesting. Very, very interesting. I heard a story once of a young lad going door to door collecting bottles to sell for some pocket money. And he went to a door and said to the lady, do you have any empty beer bottles? And she said, does this look like a face that drinks beer? He said, oh, do you have any empty vinegar bottles? SPEAKER C Yes. And so when you deal with those kind of people, one of the most important things is for your own life to have forgiveness of them. That's another thing that's been studied a lot in longevity. And people that live longer, people who have learned to accept forgiveness and to also give forgiveness live longer. And they live with less pain, they have lower blood pressures. In one study, they took people into a hospital setting where they were doing seminars and workshops, and their workshop was on forgiveness. And they brought the people in and they said, okay, we're going to learn how to forgive and how to accept forgiveness. It was a program that went for six weeks, one night a week. And they discovered by checking people's blood pressure that over the period of those six weeks, people who came in with high blood pressure went away with normal blood pressure. So there's some big factors there that play into longevity in the way of mental health. SPEAKER A Yes, it's very much being shown to promote health. Someone described non forgiveness this way. They said it's like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. Because really, it does have a terrible, really bad effect on our whole being to harbor that non forgiveness. SPEAKER C Definitely. SPEAKER A And some of the people that they're still not forgiving are dead. So it's not hurting them. Definitely not hurting them. And often doesn't hurt people even who are still alive, but it hurts the person who's not forgiving. SPEAKER C Another aspect to this spirituality is people who feel comfort from their religion. I mean, it's one thing to be religious and show up at church all the time, but it's another thing to actually have a meaningful experience with it. And they studied people going into heart surgery, all these people going in to have their bypass. And they discovered if people found comfort from their religion and were socially active, they were 14 times less likely to die 1414 times less likely to die from their heart surgery than if they didn't find any comfort from their religion. SPEAKER A That's massive. That is absolutely massive. SPEAKER C Which means we better start screening people for religion before we cut on them. Yes, doctor, ethical, but it certainly has an outcome. Send this chaplain in ahead of time to have a talk with them. SPEAKER A And hospitals do have chaplains, don't they? SPEAKER C Oh, yes. And it makes a difference. Another aspect to longevity is whether or not people are really interested in what they're doing. In other words, is my life meaningful? People who do things that aren't meaningful. This is sort of highlighted by the fact that people will at least in the old days, they would come up to retirement without a plan for retirement. And like, General Motors employees would retire and within two years they would be dead. No purpose, no direction, nothing to do. But now people are having more plans for retirement. There's a lot of companies out there that specialize in older people. For example, trips, bus trips or games. Like around here it's the bowls, right? All different things that keep them active. When they're more active and they have a purpose, then they live longer. So nowadays people live into their sixty s, seventy s and eighty s, and they don't experience as much decline as people did back then. And so it's breaking some of the pension programs. Yes, but keeps people going. SPEAKER A Mind you, in some cultures they don't even have a word for retirement. And they do even better because their purpose in life is being perpetuated. And I think it was in the blue Zone study. And one man was going out fishing every day and catching some fish for himself and for his family and so on, not living with him. And he was in his eighty s and he said why do you do this? And he didn't understand the question. He just didn't get it. And why wouldn't I? He loved it. He could do it. It was something nice to do and he would share it. He didn't understand the question. So retirement is foreign to some cultures. And they do live very long lives. As you say. Having a purpose in life is just a tremendously potent thing. SPEAKER C Yes. So maybe recapping a few of the things that would help in longevity. One is to eat moderately of a good vegetarian diet. It's going to be high in antioxidants. That help keep your DNA in good shape, to keep you looking good for a long time. Another thing is to keep regular exercise going. Make sure that you don't sit around too much. And then another one is to cultivate friendships. And then last of all, get spiritually involved with other people, with a church. Get to know God, because eventually we'd like to spend an eternity with him. SPEAKER A That's right. That is longevity, isn't it? A longer life. We hope that you've benefited greatly from this program. I always do. Even the things that I already know. It's very good to be reminded of them. And if you want to watch our programs on demand, just go to our website. That's 3abnaustralia.org.au And click on the watch button. We hope to see you next time and I really want God to bless you. And bless you. Thank you. SPEAKER B You’ve been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia Television.