BouncingBabyBoomer.com

Future Boomer Centenarians

Have you noticed how often health experts are speaking to us today as if our entire Gen will be full of centenarians? First I heard Mike (RealAge) Roizen on a PBS pledge special last week (links below). Then today, on Today, Terri Trespico from the magazine Body+Soul did a meaty, yet concise, segment with her Top 10 tips for healthy aging. None of it depends on radical regimens, either; all are saying that a few simple lifestyle shifts can radically improve the odds of our own lively longevity.

Spoiler alert: I am going to summarize Terri's top ten tips below, but it's still worth clicking through on the links at the end to watch or read the whole segment from the show.

 

1. Punch up the potassium
The first suggestion was for bananas, papayas, potatoes, and all those great leafy greens like kale. Potassium eaters over 65 kept 3.6% more lean muscle mass in old age.

2. Keep smiling
An upbeat attitude not only makes daily life more pleasant, statistics show it also adds years to the lifespan due to less damage from stress hormones such as cortisol.

3. Breathe deeply and often
Exercise is inversely related to age at death. Aim for 20-30 minutes of brisk activity 5 days per week. Meanwhile learn to breathe deeply several times a day (make your navel rise while inhaling, says Roizen). It oxygenates deep organs and tissues.

4. Swallow a few good bugs
Probiotics, such as found in yogurt or capsules, improve immunity and decrease risk of colon cancer. Other fermented foods such as tempeh are excellent too. (See article link below for more detailed suggestions).

A 40 Second Aging Test

This is the first time I have shared a piece of email hot out of the InBox (with an anonymous author to boot) as forwarded by a longtime friend. But it made me grin enough to just jump in and re-post.

Reasons why to follow.

----- begin snippet/ ----------

Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2009

Subject: 40 Second Aging Test  

The following was developed as a mental age assessment by the School of Psychiatry at Harvard University {yahsureyoubetcha she interjects}.

Take your time and see if you can read each line aloud without a mistake. The average person over 40 years of age doesn't get it! {beware of the early or frequent mis-use of exclamation points}...

Points of Light in the Clouds

It's fascinating to watch a whole culture re-compile on the fly, and if I want some encouragement during these downer times, it helps me to look at how good we Americans are at re-inventing ourselves while re-shaping our environments. For that kind of encouragement, I can already find many points of light in the blogosphere where new forms of creativity are blooming left and right. Below some recent examples:

1. Creative Perspective
This week I stumbled on a wonderful visualization site, WallStats.com, the creative overflow stack of graphic artist, Jess Bachman. At left is a thumbnail corner of the vivid graphic that first put him on my own radar -- a diagram of what the bailout might mean to you and me, Jane and Joe Taxpayer. If you go there, click around. He has a number of interesting messages and data sets that show his point as much as tell it. If we can't fix this mess anytime soon, perhaps it's a bit of comfort to gain more perspective.

2. Creative Frugality
Have you begun to wonder yet how extended hard times might effect younger Boomers and their sibs who grew up accustomed to "living large" in better times? A number of younger bloggers are thinking about that too, and what you might call "creative frugality" is already gaining buzz among the Twittering and Thumb-texting set who are joining the ranks of the newly unemployed (see also item 3 below). One example is the "Nate's Cents" blog on making the switch to living lean without giving up all pleasure. We oldsters may smile to see so many of our own former life themes re-framed, but hey, at least the kids were listening. Perhaps we can tune into them ourselves and learn a few new things. Meanwhile, since I am not so far past parenting teens, I got a good grin from this post which gives a sense of how some 20-somethings might coach each other when they think the 'rents aren't listening.