11 Enjoy a glass of wine, in silence Soothe and protect your ears at the same time. Some research suggests that a little alcohol somehow slows age-related hearing loss.
12 Get moving! Exercise improves blood flow to all body cells - including the ever-so-delicate hair cells inside your ears. But don't listen to loud music on headphones while you walk or work out. A Swedish study found that even at a moderate volume, exercisers with headphones had hearing a loss after just 10 minutes.
13 Stop the buzz of tinnitus Ringing in the ears is a problem for 10-14 percent of older adults - often the noise sounds like a squeal, a roar or a whistle or hiss. Controlling your blood pressure and lowering your cholesterol can help. so can avoiding alcohol, which increases blood flow to the inner ear. Quiet 'white noise' such as a fan or soft radio static can help to mask the buzz.
14 Have a bowl of vegetable soup and a fruit salad topped with nuts Laboratory studies suggest that extra vitamins A, C and E may protect against ear damage caused by exposure to loud noises. Skip the supplements, though. Get extra vitamin A from sweet potatoes, carrots and turnip greens as well as mango, papaya and apricots. Soak up extra E in almonds pistachios and wheat germ. For vitamin C, how about citrus, strawberries and red peppers?
3 hearing thieves to avoid
These three habits have been shown to have a particularly bad effect on your hearing.
1 Caffeine Make your morning blend decaffeinated. caffeine can worsen tinnitus, another problem associated with hearing loss.
2 Excess sodium choose low-sodium foods and take the salt cellar off the table, too. There's evidence that controlling your sodium levels can help to reduce your odds of a vertigo problem called Meniere's disease, which is also linked with hearing loss. Too much salt can alter the pressure of fluids in your inner ear.
3 Smoking Exposure to tobacco smoke - from your cigarette or someone else's - raises your odds of more severe age-related hearing loss.
Diabetes
If you haven't heard the word 'epidemic' linked to the word 'diabetes', then you've clearly chosen to avoid the TV news, the newspapers and even the internet. For few health stories have had a much coverage in recent years - and rightly so - than the growing menace of type 2, or 'adult-onset' diabetes.
As the World Health Organization - an international agency not known for its bold pronouncements - puts it: 'Diabetes is a common condition and its frequency is dramatically rising all over the world.' Today, at least 171 million people worldwide have the disease, a figure likely to more than double by 2030 as populations age. And just who are these people? Primarily, those 'above the age of retirement', according to the World Health Organization. In other words, other people. In fact,
one in five people aged 75 and over has diabetes.
But let's be clear: diabetes is not merely a side effect to ageing. Yes, it's true that as we age, our bodies become less efficient at producing and using glucose and insulin - the two key factors in type 2 diabetes. But this natural decline isn't enough to cause the disease. Instead, look at the other major lifestyle issues of our time.
Not too long ago, many people - and doctors - blamed a diet high in sugar as the cause of type 2 diabetes. Today, we know that's not the real issue (though, yes, eating lots of refined sugar and refined carbohydrates does cause troublesome peaks and troughs in your blood sugar levels that make diabetes problems worse). More recently, doctors have shown that being overweight is a major risk factor for the disease.
But here's the breakthrough news, based on an increasing body of evidence: the amount you exercise - not just how much you eat - in large part determines your risk of developing diabetes or its precursor, insulin resistance. Put simply, sedentary living, coupled with excess body weight, are the real culprits. And you control both.
To prevent diabetes, then, you need to take action. And the first step is to become educated about the disease.
Understanding insulin resistance
To start, there are two types of diabetes. Type 1 starts in childhood and is usually related to a malfunctioning pancreas. It requires a lifetime of careful management and, often dairy insulin injections. Type 2 is far more common, and is the form of diabetes that is rising in epidemic proportions, due in large part to the growing unhealthiness of our daily lives.
Type 2 diabetes, usually progresses along a predictable pattern. Before there is diabetes, there is insulin resistance. It works like this. Every time you eat, your body signals to the 'beta' cells in your pancreas that it's time to pump out the hormone insulin. Insulin's job is to shepherd the energy extracted from your food - in the form of glucose, commonly called blood sugar - into each living cell of your body.
Insulin does this in a kind of lock-and-key process by fitting into molecules on the surface of cells called insulin receptors. Once 'unlocked', the cell performs is energy exchange, either pulling in glucose from the bloodstream to use or store, or sending out stored energy - as either fat or glycogen (the stored form of glucose) - to be used by other parts of your body when they have depleted their own energy stores.
Once a cell is filled with fat or glycogen, or if the cell has been inactive for a long time, it moves the insulin receptors deep within, effectively making it impossible for insulin to reach them. But as the cell uses up its energy stores, it becomes thinner, and those insulin receptors move to the cell's surface again. And the cycle resumes, with the receptors ready to bond with insulin and usher in more glucose to the cell.
But if you're overweight and/or sedentary, more of those insulin receptors stay hidden within the cell. The result? Glucose and insulin build up in your bloodstream. Those high levels of glucose gets in. But this process gets more difficult every year until, finally, your beta cells wear out like an overworked engine. The next thing you know, your body lacks the capacity to make enough insulin to carry energy to all your cells. And that is why many people develop diabetes and require treatment with drugs or even insulin shots.
The relatively simple relationship between glucose and insulin becomes more complex as you age because of the presence of a sound hormone called glucagon. While pancreatic beta cells react to high glucose levels by issuing insulin, their neighbours, the alpha cells, react to low glucose levels by issuing glucagon. This hormone attaches onto receptors in the liver, telling it to release glucose levels by issuing glucagon. This hormone attaches onto receptors in the liver, telling it to release glucose into the bloodstream to provide energy for the rest of the body.
The thing is, alpha cells learn about the state of blood glucose levels only from signals they receive from the beta cells. In older people with insulin resistance or type 2 diabetes, communication breaks down between alpha and beta cells in the pancreas. So even while beta cells are releasing insulin in response to high blood glucose levels, alpha cells are releasing glucagon, stimulating even more glucose to be released into the bloodstream. You can see how this can become a real mess. And the mess is called diabetes.
Once you have diabetes, you become subject to a range of complications as you age, including blindness, chronic nerve pain, nerve damage, incontinence, impotence, memory loss and, of course, the biggie: heart disease. If you have diabetes, you're more likely to have a heart attack than a lifelong smoker - even if you've never taken a puff yourself. Diabetes is also the strongest predictor of functional decline in older people, that is, how they handle the day-to-day tasks of life such as walking, dressing or house-cleaning. Plus you're more likely to be depressed or to develop dementia and Alzheimer's. And it means you're twice as likely to be in hospital and require other medical services as people the same age who don't have diabetes.
6 ways to prevent diabetes
The good news is that insulin resistance and, in some cases, type 2 diabetes can be reversed through generally healthy living, as prescribed throughout this discussion. Not only that, but a healthy lifestyle can prevent the disease - even if you already have insulin resistance. The following tips have been proven in studies to have particularly strong preventive powers.
1 Strengthen your muscles Work out with hand weights, six days a week. It's the best
12 Get moving! Exercise improves blood flow to all body cells - including the ever-so-delicate hair cells inside your ears. But don't listen to loud music on headphones while you walk or work out. A Swedish study found that even at a moderate volume, exercisers with headphones had hearing a loss after just 10 minutes.
13 Stop the buzz of tinnitus Ringing in the ears is a problem for 10-14 percent of older adults - often the noise sounds like a squeal, a roar or a whistle or hiss. Controlling your blood pressure and lowering your cholesterol can help. so can avoiding alcohol, which increases blood flow to the inner ear. Quiet 'white noise' such as a fan or soft radio static can help to mask the buzz.
14 Have a bowl of vegetable soup and a fruit salad topped with nuts Laboratory studies suggest that extra vitamins A, C and E may protect against ear damage caused by exposure to loud noises. Skip the supplements, though. Get extra vitamin A from sweet potatoes, carrots and turnip greens as well as mango, papaya and apricots. Soak up extra E in almonds pistachios and wheat germ. For vitamin C, how about citrus, strawberries and red peppers?
3 hearing thieves to avoid
These three habits have been shown to have a particularly bad effect on your hearing.
1 Caffeine Make your morning blend decaffeinated. caffeine can worsen tinnitus, another problem associated with hearing loss.
2 Excess sodium choose low-sodium foods and take the salt cellar off the table, too. There's evidence that controlling your sodium levels can help to reduce your odds of a vertigo problem called Meniere's disease, which is also linked with hearing loss. Too much salt can alter the pressure of fluids in your inner ear.
3 Smoking Exposure to tobacco smoke - from your cigarette or someone else's - raises your odds of more severe age-related hearing loss.
Diabetes
If you haven't heard the word 'epidemic' linked to the word 'diabetes', then you've clearly chosen to avoid the TV news, the newspapers and even the internet. For few health stories have had a much coverage in recent years - and rightly so - than the growing menace of type 2, or 'adult-onset' diabetes.
As the World Health Organization - an international agency not known for its bold pronouncements - puts it: 'Diabetes is a common condition and its frequency is dramatically rising all over the world.' Today, at least 171 million people worldwide have the disease, a figure likely to more than double by 2030 as populations age. And just who are these people? Primarily, those 'above the age of retirement', according to the World Health Organization. In other words, other people. In fact,
one in five people aged 75 and over has diabetes.
But let's be clear: diabetes is not merely a side effect to ageing. Yes, it's true that as we age, our bodies become less efficient at producing and using glucose and insulin - the two key factors in type 2 diabetes. But this natural decline isn't enough to cause the disease. Instead, look at the other major lifestyle issues of our time.
Not too long ago, many people - and doctors - blamed a diet high in sugar as the cause of type 2 diabetes. Today, we know that's not the real issue (though, yes, eating lots of refined sugar and refined carbohydrates does cause troublesome peaks and troughs in your blood sugar levels that make diabetes problems worse). More recently, doctors have shown that being overweight is a major risk factor for the disease.
But here's the breakthrough news, based on an increasing body of evidence: the amount you exercise - not just how much you eat - in large part determines your risk of developing diabetes or its precursor, insulin resistance. Put simply, sedentary living, coupled with excess body weight, are the real culprits. And you control both.
To prevent diabetes, then, you need to take action. And the first step is to become educated about the disease.
Understanding insulin resistance
To start, there are two types of diabetes. Type 1 starts in childhood and is usually related to a malfunctioning pancreas. It requires a lifetime of careful management and, often dairy insulin injections. Type 2 is far more common, and is the form of diabetes that is rising in epidemic proportions, due in large part to the growing unhealthiness of our daily lives.
Type 2 diabetes, usually progresses along a predictable pattern. Before there is diabetes, there is insulin resistance. It works like this. Every time you eat, your body signals to the 'beta' cells in your pancreas that it's time to pump out the hormone insulin. Insulin's job is to shepherd the energy extracted from your food - in the form of glucose, commonly called blood sugar - into each living cell of your body.
Insulin does this in a kind of lock-and-key process by fitting into molecules on the surface of cells called insulin receptors. Once 'unlocked', the cell performs is energy exchange, either pulling in glucose from the bloodstream to use or store, or sending out stored energy - as either fat or glycogen (the stored form of glucose) - to be used by other parts of your body when they have depleted their own energy stores.
Once a cell is filled with fat or glycogen, or if the cell has been inactive for a long time, it moves the insulin receptors deep within, effectively making it impossible for insulin to reach them. But as the cell uses up its energy stores, it becomes thinner, and those insulin receptors move to the cell's surface again. And the cycle resumes, with the receptors ready to bond with insulin and usher in more glucose to the cell.
But if you're overweight and/or sedentary, more of those insulin receptors stay hidden within the cell. The result? Glucose and insulin build up in your bloodstream. Those high levels of glucose gets in. But this process gets more difficult every year until, finally, your beta cells wear out like an overworked engine. The next thing you know, your body lacks the capacity to make enough insulin to carry energy to all your cells. And that is why many people develop diabetes and require treatment with drugs or even insulin shots.
The relatively simple relationship between glucose and insulin becomes more complex as you age because of the presence of a sound hormone called glucagon. While pancreatic beta cells react to high glucose levels by issuing insulin, their neighbours, the alpha cells, react to low glucose levels by issuing glucagon. This hormone attaches onto receptors in the liver, telling it to release glucose levels by issuing glucagon. This hormone attaches onto receptors in the liver, telling it to release glucose into the bloodstream to provide energy for the rest of the body.
The thing is, alpha cells learn about the state of blood glucose levels only from signals they receive from the beta cells. In older people with insulin resistance or type 2 diabetes, communication breaks down between alpha and beta cells in the pancreas. So even while beta cells are releasing insulin in response to high blood glucose levels, alpha cells are releasing glucagon, stimulating even more glucose to be released into the bloodstream. You can see how this can become a real mess. And the mess is called diabetes.
Once you have diabetes, you become subject to a range of complications as you age, including blindness, chronic nerve pain, nerve damage, incontinence, impotence, memory loss and, of course, the biggie: heart disease. If you have diabetes, you're more likely to have a heart attack than a lifelong smoker - even if you've never taken a puff yourself. Diabetes is also the strongest predictor of functional decline in older people, that is, how they handle the day-to-day tasks of life such as walking, dressing or house-cleaning. Plus you're more likely to be depressed or to develop dementia and Alzheimer's. And it means you're twice as likely to be in hospital and require other medical services as people the same age who don't have diabetes.
6 ways to prevent diabetes
The good news is that insulin resistance and, in some cases, type 2 diabetes can be reversed through generally healthy living, as prescribed throughout this discussion. Not only that, but a healthy lifestyle can prevent the disease - even if you already have insulin resistance. The following tips have been proven in studies to have particularly strong preventive powers.
1 Strengthen your muscles Work out with hand weights, six days a week. It's the best
No comments:
Post a Comment