Dr. Mercola has written another home-run article – this time on anti-aging, titled “See My Presentation at the Anti-Aging Conference,” posted 3-18-10.

Please read the article in its entirety. Here are some key bullet points:

• Many doctors simply are not able to truly help their patients get well because they’ve been more or less handcuffed by the pharmaceutical industry, which rules this current medical paradigm with an iron fist.
• How is Anti-Aging Medicine Different from Regular Medicine? Anti-aging medicine is about functional medicine. It’s about maintaining or restoring you to your optimal functional self. It’s not about combating sickness, but rather about optimizing health.
• Functional health is a different approach that offers different solutions from conventional medicine, which is largely based on the idea that “health” can be achieved by suppressing symptoms of disease with chemicals.
• How do you find a such a doctor? Try health food stores for word of mouth and the internet. There are many Facebook groups available. In July 2009, Facebook had 250 million users. Now they are over 400 million – that’s a lot of potential feedback and word of mouth recommendations!
• The three primary areas of wellness: diet (nutrition), exercise, and addressing your emotions and stress.
• Even the conservative Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that 85 percent of all diseases have an emotional element, but the actual percentage is probably much higher.
• Other scientists and medical doctors who have left their conventional medical and scientific dogmas behind — once they saw the proof for themselves — claim that 100 percent of your current health status is due to your mental and emotional reactions to events that take place during your lifetime.

Here are Dr. Mercola’s top “anti-aging” recommendations:

• Learn how to effectively cope with stress.
• Eat a healthy diet for your nutritional type.
• Take omega-3.
• Get antioxidants from foods – Good sources include blueberries, cranberries, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, cherries, beans, and artichokes.
• Use coconut oil – Coconut oil can be used in place of other oils, margarine, butter, or shortening, and can be used for all your cooking needs. It can help you lose weight, or maintain your already good weight, reduce your risk of heart disease, and lower your cholesterol, among other things.
• Get your resveratrol naturally –From natural sources, such as whole grape skins and seeds, raspberries, mulberries, and peanuts.
• Make sure you have a solid exercise program – It’s never too late to start. It’s been shown that even individuals in their 70’s can substantially increase both strength and endurance with exercise.
• Avoid as many chemicals, toxins, and pollutants as possible – This includes tossing out your toxic household cleaners, soaps, personal care products, air fresheners, bug sprays, lawn pesticides, and insecticides, just to name a few, and replacing them with non-toxic alternatives.
• Avoid pharmaceutical drugs – If you adhere to a healthy lifestyle, you most likely will never need any of them in the first place.

What You Can Learn from Those Who’ve Lived the Longest

Common denominators among the people who’ve lived the longest include:

• Eating a plant-based diet
• Drinking diuretic-type teas on a regular basis
• Living in areas that promote regular physical activity, such as daily walking as the main means of getting around
• Living in societies where friends and family encourage a healthy, natural, active lifestyle
• Having effective strategies for coping with stress, such as prayer, meditation, strong social networks, and napping daily

In fact, being able to effectively cope with stress, it turns out, is one of the MAJOR common denominators for those who live long, healthy lives.

One of the proposed reasons for this strong link is that stress promotes inflammation, so being able to reduce the inflammatory response in your body can have a significant impact on your overall health. This is also believed to be one of the major reasons why so many centenarians appear to be more or less immune to brain degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

BIG message from today’s article…if you want to live and live a healthy life, there are lots of things we can do, but coping with stress is HUGE.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 11:34 am and is filed under Anti-Aging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.