Prescription for Life: Three Simple Strategies to Live Younger Longer

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Part 1

What You Need to Understand about the Aging Process

What you are about to learn is much more than a diet plan or how to lose weight or start an exercise program. It is more than getting your body to an ideal weight and maintaining that weight, and it’s not just about preventing a heart attack or a stroke. It’s not even just about the aging of your arteries.

The Prescription for Life plan also teaches you how to help prevent the major cancers. And you may not be diabetic or have high blood pressure now, but by the end of this book you will know how to prevent such conditions from occurring in your body.

In a nutshell, the goal is to live young physiologically—until you die at an old age chronologically. And the first step is to understand the aging process.

1

Your Course Determines Your Destination

It was mid-morning on Grand Cayman Island as I sat reading in a lounge chair in the shade of a casuarina pine. The sun was out, there was a slight breeze, and very few people were on the beach.

I looked up and saw him running like I had so many times before. I had watched him for several years, running the same route at least three days a week. He never wore a shirt, and the skin under his hairy shoulders was almost black from years of sun exposure. He was trim, muscular, and his stride was not all that fast, but it was consistent. I guessed him to be in his early sixties.

I got up out of my chair to trot along beside him and ask about his exercise routine. But when he saw me approaching, he stopped to talk. I couldn’t believe how healthy and muscular he looked up close. He was Italian and had grown up in Italy, but he had worked in Saudi Arabia and Alaska for a worldwide contracting firm. He had been transferred to this island thirty years ago to help construct hotels and for the past ten years had stayed here in retirement. He was the epitome of good health.

I complimented him on his health, and that is all it took to turn on his brag button. He immediately began telling me about his lifestyle. He ate mostly vegetables. He had weights and a stationary bicycle in his home. Three days a week, he was on his bike two hours in the morning. Three days a week, he jogged six miles on the beach. When he worked hotel construction on the beach, he would use his lunch break to swim a half mile straight out into the ocean. Of course, he said with his Italian accent, I had to swim the same distance back.

He had recently been tested physiologically. I tell you my results, he said with his accent that made me smile. "I am seventy-five, but the machine say I am sixty-one. I’m younger than I am. He flexed his arms and pulled his shoulders back. Most of my friends my age on this island are old. They sit around and drink, and play cards, and watch television. Plus, they’re fat—most of them."

Then he made the statement that made me admire him the most. I want to be active when I die. He smiled and trotted off down the beach, waving with one hand without even glancing back.

That said it all. He didn’t want to be active until a year before he died. He didn’t want to be active until he died. He wanted to be active when he died. I don’t know what the rest of his life is like, but I want to be like him physiologically.

With the Prescription for Life plan, you should be able to add seven to twelve years to your life expectancy, depending on your present condition. But what good is it to live longer if your mind doesn’t recognize your friends or family? What good is it to extend your life if you are barely able to get around? What good is it to live more years if you are going to sit in a wheelchair and stare or be bedridden for the last part of your life?

No good at all—unless you are physiologically healthy during those extra years. And that’s what this plan is all about. You can actually become younger physiologically than you are right now. With the Prescription for Life plan, when your chronological age is sixty-eight, your physiological age can be fifty.

You are about to begin a life-changing journey that will be worth far more than all the money you will ever have in your bank account. I like to use Charles Dickens’s 1843 story, A Christmas Carol, as an illustration. As you probably recall, Ebenezer Scrooge is the principal character. Three ghosts come to him on Christmas Eve, and the last of the three is the ghost of Christmas yet to come. This ghost takes Scrooge to a grave, where no one mourns the man who has died, where all he had in material goods is now for naught. The ghost reveals to Scrooge that this is his own future if his present course doesn’t change. As you know, Scrooge makes a decision to change because he realizes in that moment what his future will be. He changes his course and turns his life around for the good.

This book will show you where you will end up if you continue on a wrong course. More than half of Americans are on that path, eating the wrong foods, enjoying life as couch potatoes, and not maintaining their ideal weight. They will hasten their demise if they stay on that course, if they choose not to change their direction.

It is sad to live in a world that dark—especially if you don’t even know you need to change. You don’t want to look back five years or ten years from now and say, What might have been . . . if only.

Scrooge woke up the next morning realizing he could change. People do change. And no matter how good your lifestyle of eating, exercising, and weight control may be presently, even if it is great, it can get better.

If you’re ready to make a change for the better, it will be helpful to find an accountability partner or group. Studies show that such support increases your exercise time by 20 percent. It works similarly in losing weight. Get a partner and you can both watch your physiological age decrease. Get a partner or join a group and commit to developing the three most important lifestyle strategies you can ever follow to remain as young as you possibly can.

Your journey begins here to get you on the right course, yet to come.

2

Your Arteries Are the Cornerstone of the Aging Process

The aging process depends primarily on the condition of your arteries. If you remember nothing else I have said thus far, remember this: your arteries play a monumental role in the physiological aging of your body. The flow of blood through your body carries nutrients, oxygen, electrolytes, and other essentials that keep the body running like a new engine. That blood is pumped through your system by the heart and is carried by sixty thousand miles of arteries, plus veins.

The condition of the arteries determines how well the body is supplied with all it needs to function at 100 percent. As those arteries become damaged by certain cholesterol particles, the walls begin to respond by developing a battlefield to fight those foreign bodies, and either plaque buildup or inflammation results in a clot. Both events can cause the blood flow to either completely stop or become markedly decreased. The downstream area becomes starved for oxygen.

If the heart is involved, a portion of the muscle quits working and the remaining fibers are called on to carry an extra load of pumping your blood. The result is a less effective pump.

If the affected organ is the brain, that portion of brain tissue supplied by that particular artery quits working. If it is sudden, you have a stroke in which the part of the body supplied by that portion of the brain quits working immediately. If it is a slow blockage process, you could end up with what is called dementia, and slowly, over the years, you begin to forget, function slower, lose your reasoning, and finally lose your memory.

How Blockages Begin

The blockage process in an artery begins with certain cholesterol particles floating in the bloodstream. At different locations, usually where the artery divides or branches, there is turbulence in the blood flow. In such areas, these particles are pounded into the wall of the artery. They are forced through the inner lining and end up implanted within the wall. As time goes by, many more of these minute particles continue building up, and your body sends in special cells and a flood of fluid to begin fighting off these foreign bodies, which, of course, are not supposed to be there.

The result of such a battle is a partial or complete blockage. If it goes on long enough, even calcium can be deposited into the plaque formation. This is a silent process. It doesn’t cause you any pain. It doesn’t give you a headache or make your chest hurt. It works quietly while you order extra cheese on your hamburger.

Most people don’t understand this process. You are getting ready to know exactly what is going on. I believe if you were standing in the middle of the railroad tracks and a freight train was coming, you would jump out of its way before it ran you over. I’m sounding the alarm so you can avoid that train with your health. When we finish, you won’t be able to plead ignorance. You can do specific things every day for the rest of your life that will keep those blocking particles out of your bloodstream and those arteries youthful.

Let’s look at the layers of an artery and see what happens when you eat the wrong foods. The thin inner layer is called the intima. Think of it as the protective portion of the arterial wall. It should be capable of keeping anything from getting through the inner lining and into the wall of the artery. Picture it as being made up of individual pieces of a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, each piece with a Teflon coating. This makes it smooth and slick, and nothing sticks to it or penetrates it. If you could magnify the intima, you would see that each of these interlocking cells is held together by little proteins, locked arm in arm. Think of these proteins as a line of soldiers that will not let anything penetrate through this lining.

Now let’s go through that very thin inner lining and look at the next layer. This thicker, spongy layer is called the media. This is where the fighting takes place. Think of the media as the battleground of the aging process. This is where all kinds of things happen that determine whether you stay young or get older ahead of your chronological time frame. Even though so much fighting takes place in the media, the big problem is that we don’t feel anything while the battle is going on.

If you were to hit your finger with a hammer, you would make all kinds of fuss. You would make sure that would never happen again. You would see the place the hammer hit immediately begin to swell. You most likely would put ice on it and elevate it to help prevent more swelling. But the problem with the damage that goes on in your arteries is that you are completely unaware it’s happening, and you let it happen again and again.

Finally, we come to the outer layer, which is a thin, smooth covering that is fairly firm but pliable and doesn’t really play a part in any of these problems.

You Are Only as Young as Your Arteries

Think about it a minute. If your arteries begin to age, you age. If you protect your arteries, you will, physiologically speaking, stop the clock. You can even turn your physiological age back quite a few years with some basic lifestyle changes that you can maintain the rest of your life.

Heart attacks, strokes, dementia, and erectile dysfunction are all caused by not protecting your arteries with a proper lifestyle. The same blockage happening in your heart is happening in the arteries to your kidneys, to your intestines, to the muscles in your legs, to every part of your body.

You may have absolutely no symptoms of blockage in your arteries, but I assure you that you have cholesterol deposits building up in your arteries. By the time patients present with EKG changes, or chest pain, or numbness going down their arm, it has already happened. We see the same thing with brains, when patients present with weakness, or numbness around their mouths, or dizziness.

It’s an ongoing process because of your eating habits.

Many of these arteries are already 95 percent blocked. I have operated on many carotid arteries, the two main arteries going to the brain. Some have been 90 to 95 percent blocked without the patient ever having any symptoms. Their doctor just happened to find the blockage in a routine physical examination.

Don’t wait for symptoms caused from the blockage of your arteries before you do something to prevent a stroke or heart attack. And for you men, the same goes for erectile dysfunction. Don’t wait until it happens to decide you are going to protect your arteries.

Don’t Let Your First Symptom Be Death

A few summers ago, I was at a fishing lodge in Alaska. A well-known individual lived nearby, and I had the opportunity to visit his home one afternoon. He appeared to be in excellent health except for being overweight. He said his blood pressure had always been normal. He had an almost constant, natural smile. Everything seemed great.

As I was standing by the lake before leaving, he mentioned he had experienced some occasional dizziness and that his doctor had started him on a blood thinner. I placed my right index and middle fingers on the left side of his neck to feel for his carotid pulse. The two carotid arteries, one on each side of the windpipe, are the major arteries feeding our brains. I wanted to see if I could feel turbulence in the blood flow. If dizziness happens to be the result of a partial blockage of the carotid artery, I can actually feel a vibration (physicians call that vibration a thrill) as the blood squeezes through the partially blocked area. If there is partial blockage, that plaque can be removed to get normal flow going to the brain before a stroke occurs. If I felt such a vibration, I was going to tell him to go into town and have his arteries checked out.

I was surprised—not only did I not feel a thrill in his left carotid artery, but I didn’t feel any pulse at all.

That was not good, because you can’t operate on the artery after it is completely blocked. There is nothing surgically you can do to restore the blood flow to that side of the brain. My assumption was that he was supplying his entire brain from the remaining carotid. As he kept talking, I felt for the pulse in his right carotid.

Nothing.

He had no blood flow through either of the major arteries to his brain. The brain has only four arteries supplying it, the two main carotids and two very small arteries in the back of the brain. I knew the only blood he was getting to his entire brain was from those two minute vertebral arteries. They normally carry less than 10 percent of total blood flow to the brain, but for him, they were carrying 100 percent.

I felt sick. The vehicles for the main blood supply to his brain were demolished. He had no symptoms except a little dizziness from time to time. Even though I realized nothing of significance could be done, I recommended he see his doctor again, concerning the dizziness. As I got into the boat to leave, I knew he had only a short time left on this earth.

He did see his doctor, but nothing could be suggested for him to do. Three months later, a friend informed me the gentleman had had a massive stroke and died.

The damage to his arteries had taken years and years to completely block the flow of life-giving blood to his brain. I tell you this story to emphasize you can have partial blockage of an artery in your body for years without any symptoms at all. His first symptom of dizziness was a warning that came too late for him to halt the process. Don’t wait for symptoms. Even then, it may be too