How to Keep yourself Young and Healthy

The aging process is for the greater part no mystery anymore. It consists for a great part of daily damages done on the macroscopic, tissue, cellular and genetic levels. These add up as the years are passing. These damages have specific causes like oxidizing agents, sun beams, mechanical wear and tear, psychological stress, lack of some nutritional components and too much of others, like fat.

Another component of aging is the reduction of the telomere chains at the chromosome ends, as each cell division occurs. When these are shortened enough, cells stop dividing. However, the body has means to repair these ends again, with an enzyme called telomerase. The rapidity of the aging process depends on lack of efficiency in this repair process. The above mention aging causes also slow down this repair process.

The factors causing aging, also causes other diseases like cancer and coronary heart disease. Both aging and these diseases can in great extend be prevented with the knowledge possessed today, and the damages can in great extend be reversed. The components to achieve this are:

-You should keep an adequate daily diet containing whole cereals, peas, beans, vegetables, fruit, fish, mushrooms, fouls and seafood, and with just a moderate amount of red meat.

-Consume just a moderate amount of fat. In order to avoid a too high fat consume, you should use just a little amount of fat or oils in your cooking. The food in a varied diet already contains fat.

-Ideally much of the fat one eats, should be of the type mono-unsaturated. One also needs some poly-unsaturated fat of the types omega-3, and omega 6, but not too much of omega-6. The consumption of saturated fat should be very little. In order to achieve a right fat balance, you should combine fat sources from 3 groups in your diet.

Group 1 consists of sources of mono-unsaturated fat like: olive, canola, rape, almonds, peanuts, cashew pecan, hickory, hazel nuts, pistachio, macadamia, filbert, avocado and oils form these sources. Much of the oils you add to the food or use in warm cooking should come from this group.

Group 2 are sources of omega-3-fat like: fat fish, seafood, flax seeds and perilla. You should add some oils made from this group to your dishes in order to get enough omega-6, but these oils should not be used for frying or warm cooking.

Group 3 are good sources of omega-6-fat, like: sunflower, safflower, grape seed, cotton seed, soy, walnut, corn, sesame and wheat germ. You can also add oils from these sources to your diet, but only a little. They should not be used for frying.

-Do not use high amounts of soy oil, margarine, corn oil or palm oil in your diet, as many do. A high consumption of these fat sources gives you too much saturated fat and poly-unsaturated omega-6-fat.

-You should consume just a very moderate amount of sugar, refined flour or refined cereals.

-Do not add more salt to the food than you need. Most people consume too much salt. However, some salt is needed. If the weather is warm and you are in high activity, you need more salt than by cold weather and low activity. Prefer sea-salt, because of its content of valuable minerals.

-Your use of tranquilizers/stimulants as alcohol and caffeine should be moderate, but in moderate amounts these help slowing down the aging process.

-You should absolutely not use tobacco in any amount. Nicotine and tobaco has shown to effect distinct damage, even in moderate daily doses.

-You can benefit form supplements of specific nutritional components like vitamins, minerals, anti-oxidants, lecithin and some essential fatty acids.

-You should keep a regular training program that both gives a muscular load, work up your condition and stretches out your body. To stretch out, yoga-exercises are ideal.

-Every day you should get adequate rest and stress-reduction. Daily meditation is a method of achieving this. Natural relaxing agents or specific tools for meditation or relaxation may also be useful.

-You may benefit from supplements of specific anti-aging agents like anti-oxidants or human growth hormone releasers.

-Your skin may benefit from use of specific anti-aging agents to apply upon the skin surface. These often has natural oils as important constituents. Small amounts of olive oil can be used alone upon the skin for this purpose.

-You should protect your skin against excessive sun exposure, but moderate doses of sun rays are healthy.

The amount one needs of nutritional supplements, like vitamins and minerals, differs very much according to a person’s health condition, work load and exposure to environmental stress. A person having a poor digestion, doing high performance sport or being exposed to a high amount of environmental stressors, may need more than a person in an average situation.