It is said 100 is the full measure of a human life. As longevity increases with more available scientific knowledge, becoming 100 is no longer impossible. But staying healthy and happy at 100 is an enormous challenge. Septuagenarian Dr. Walter Bortz, a leading American ageing expert has drawn up 99 simple steps for living to 100 or beyond which show how diet, attitude, exercise and renewal can help one control one’s body’s change, growth and repair. Here are the first 10 steps in his longevity programme outlined in his book DARE to be 100.

You gotta have guts to grow old.
To claim life, you’ve got to be bold.
But you’ve got to be smart,
as well as have heart,
if you want your whole tale to be told. - Dr. Bortz

Step 1: Diet-Eat to Reach 100
An infinite variety of foodstuffs are available to supply the 70 million calories you will consume in your lifetime. We all eat a varied diet, and the more varied the better - keeping the choices plentiful ensures high quality, balanced nutrition.

For most beasts of nature, getting enough to eat is a problem; for us, it’s the opposite - we have to avoid taking in more than our bodies require. How much does one need? That depends on how much you move. Bigger, younger, and more active people are at an advan­tage. Because of their higher caloric needs, they have more latitude regard­ing food choices. Smaller, older people who are less active, on the other hand, must plan their diets with care. But no matter what your size or age, the more you move, the better your body will utilize your food intake. Bottom line: Keep food choices var­ied, and keep moving!

Step 2: Read Well to Eat Well
No matter how much information labels include, they’re of no use unless people read them. It’s still up to you to be smart enough to know the few basic steps to healthy nutrition and to apply them when you make food choices.

Revise your shopping habits to include another step - evaluating the nutritional value of the components of every meal. As you look at a food selection, pay attention not only to the price, but also to the label. What really is it that you are buying? Being an informed, purchaser and provider is being responsible.

Step 3: Diet - Know When To Eat
When you eat is just as important as what and how you eat. A gorging meal pattern raises cholestrol levels. Three decades ago at the University of Chicago, Clarence Cohn fed some volunteers a diet eaten as one meal, others a diet of meals spaced throughout the day. The results showed that the nibblers had a lower cholesterol value. From these findings, Cohn extrapolated that this may be a reason why women, at least early in life, have lower cholesterol levels than men-they tend to be graz­ers, whereas men tend to be gorgers.

After a meal containing carbohydrates, those potato, fruit, or cereal calories are preferentially used as the body’s fuel. But three hours later, the body turns to burning its fat as fuel. By eating frequent carbo snacks, you limit this traffic in fat, and thereby protect against higher cho­lesterol levels.
Bottom line: To eat right, learn to be a nibbler.

Step 4: Diet - Know your Body’s Caloric needs
A calorie is a piece of energy. Just like any machine, the right number of calories makes you run your body best. However, you should keep in mind that you need calories not just to run your machine but also to grow and repair.

As you age, your calorie needs seem to decrease. Sixteen percent of people over 60 eat fewer than 1000 calories a day. As a young person, you may require two or three times as much food and energy as you do at older ages. Clearly, then, if you con­tinue to eat the same amount at older ages as you did when you were young, you will become fat. The fat content of older people’s bodies is higher than that of younger people, both because of the calorie excess and because muscles have deteriorated from de­cades of underuse.

It takes one calorie per minute just to keep your basic machinery running, or about 1500 calories a day. This en­ergy must come from food. How well you manage this energy transaction de­termines how efficient your weight control will be. And remember, you absorb virtually all of the calories you eat.

Step 5: Diet - Fat Alert
Fat is the most energy rich of the three foodstuffs. It yields nine calories per gram, whereas carbohydrate and protein yields four calories per gram. Therefore, a food that contains fat has much more caloric energy content than one with little or no fat.

All foods are fattening, but some more than others. Fat is the way your body stores ex calories. On average, older women’s bodies contain 45 percent body fat. It should only be 25 percent. Older men’s body fat is 35 percent. It should be 15 percent. It has been calculated that every pound of excess body weight over ten costs you one month of life­What is important is the type of fats ingested. Most important are the animal saturated fats, which are harmful and raise cholesterol levels; next in terms of importance are the unsaturated vegetable oils, which may even help lower the cholesterol; and least important is the actual cholesterol in our diet, which, again raises the blood levels. It is recommended that one should consume more than 300mg total cholesterol per day, usually found in egg yolks. The wise intake for eggs seems to be no more than four per week.
Bottom line: Increase exercise, avoid fat triggers, reward yourself for pounds lost, and cholesterol levels lowered.

Step 6: Diet-Count Cholesterol
Cholesterol is not all bad. In fact, you’d be in a bad way without it, as it’s a vital part of all your cells. It’s just that you have too much of it. The simplest way to measure it is through your blood, since it gives a rough approximation of the amount in your arteries, which is, where the problem lies. The accepted normal range is below 200mg per 100cc of blood.

The cholesterol in your body comes and goes, which is why the amount in your arteries can be eliminated through a rigid “lowering” programme. Seventy percent of your cholesterol comes from that which you yourself manufacture, mostly in the liver; only one third comes directly from the diet. This is why a low-cholesterol diet is not as important as a cholesterol- lowering diet.

As it exists in your body, most cholesterol serves as a way to dissolve fat; in essence it helps absorb and transport fat. So the more fat your liver sees, ei­ther in the diet or from the fat in your body (as with stress), the more choles­terol it makes.
Bottom line: I stand firm in my con­viction that it is never too late to be as healthy as possible, and this means hav­ing as low a cholesterol and as high an HDL level as possible, no matter what your age.

Step 7: Diet-Push Carbs
Carbohydrates are pure energy. Un­like fat and protein, which serve as part of your structure, the job of carbohy­drates is almost exclusively to fuel your metabolism. After a meal, nearly all your energy comes from carbohydrates. When you don’t eat for a while, the body turns to its fat stores to run the machinery, but during the course of a day it’s the carbohydrates that keep you going.

The body has a relatively small stor­age tank of carbohydrates - only a few thousand calories at most - so you need to keep restocking it from the foods you eat. The newly formulated food pyramid advocates that you eat five servings of fruit and vegetables and six to eleven servings of cereal and grain products per day. This leads to a diet in which ap­proximately 55 percent of calories will come from carbohydrates.

A high carbohydrate diet has the ad­vantage of great diversity and low cost. Fruits, vegetables, and grains carry high levels of important micro nutrients, vitamins, and minerals with their energy provision. The simple sugars, however, are known to be “empty calories.” That is, they pro­vide only pure energy without the other good stuff. Your diet derives 20 percent of its calories from simple sugar.
Bottom line: Vegetarians tend to live a long time - this has to mean some­thing.

Step 8: Diet-Examine The Pros and Cons of Protein
Protein is who you are. Your brain, heart, and muscles are mostly protein. It is your flesh and blood, 60 percent of your dry weight.

Protein in turn consists of amino ac­ids, relatively simple compounds made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitro­gen, and some sulfur.

The most secure way to obtain essen­tial amino acids is by eating a meat diet. This is not to say that meat is the only source of these, as they are also present in some plant foods, par­ticularly legumes. A vegetarian who is wise and well instructed can totally ful­fill the basic amino acid need with a well-conceived collection of vegetables.
Bottom line: Consume protein.

Step 9: Don’t Dry Up
Drink for your health. Almost none of us pay much attention to the amount of fluid we drink - it’s just a part of our lives that takes care of itself, right? Wrong. The recommended daily allow­ance for water is 1.4 litres. Few of us drink this recommended amount just because we are supposed to. Our wonderful kidneys let us get away with such nonchalance as they carefully regulate the amount of fluid we excrete or retain it according to how much we drink. The kidneys filter 150 quarts (4,800 fluid ounces or 142 liters) per day but excrete only 1 percent of this.
But when we get older, our cueing becomes faulted. When older people are denied fluid for 24 hours, their thirst is blunted. We sometimes drink when we shouldn’t, causing dilution of our body minerals, or we don’t drink when we should which causes dehydration. Medicines, particularly diuretics, and disease conditions often seen in older people make fluid consumption more than a casual affair. Neglect of symptoms and poor compliance with medications can be very dangerous. Severe constipation can also complicate dehydration. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors only had water to drink. Nowadays, however, it seems almost no able-bodied person drinks plain water. Fluid comes in various colors and temperatures, with vary­ing bubbles and other complications. But plain water still claims many advantages. It has no calories, or salt, and it does its job of lubricating us just fine.

Then there are the external factors. Heat causes increased fluid loss through perspiration, which can, on occasion, be extreme and result in sub­stantial dehydration. Infection, when accompanied by fever, clearly imposes an increased fluid demand, and colds in particular benefit from more fluid intake, as fluids help keep the mucus from getting too sticky and difficult to eliminate. The ageing process itself has been shown to disrupt the body’s thermoregulatory center, so fluid ingestion when temperatures rise is very important. That’s why heat waves are dangerous for older people. Your body can stand weeks of calorie loss, but your fluids are at a more im­mediate risk. Make sure you drink enough fluid early in the day, so that the bladder doesn’t have to perform so much at night.
Bottom line: Drink early, drink enough, and never let your urine turn dark due to dehydration.

Step 1 0: A Little Salt Will Do
We have learned to use salt at almost every step of the food process, from preservation to processing, prepa­ration, and consumption.

Your salt intake varies from one to fifteen teaspoonfuls per day. This is in contrast to what your hunter-gatherer ancestors ate (around a quarter tea­spoonful). Ordinarily, your kidneys manage to balance the varied amount of salt you take against the need for that day. During a bout of diarrhea, which depletes you rapidly of a lot of salt, or on a very heavy sweating day during which two teaspoonfuls can be lost in the sweat, your kidneys shut down salt excretion to prevent further loss. Conversely, when you consume a heavier than average load, the kidneys simply get rid of it.

But what if the balancing act is im­perfect? What if too much is lost or too much is saved? If the concentration of sodium in your body fluids becomes too low as the result of excess sweating, vom­iting, or diarrhea, you become weak, confused, and even delirious. If your sodium content is too acutely high, you become dehydrated. If it is chronically high, you can develop high blood pres­sure.

Bottom Line: To prevent this pre­dicament, stay slim, exercise, and watch your salt intake. Read food labels. Eat fresh foods that have very little salt.

Courtesy: Dignity Dialogue

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