I was stunned to watch 60-Minutes last night when they interviewed people who are over 90 years old. They have been followed for over 30 years since they joined what used to be called Leisure World close to San Diego. This group is an interesting group to study since the researchers (at UC Irvine) have their full records, including vitamin intake, illnesses, they test them regularly for dementia and other ailments and also place them into the MRI to see if the researchers can learn something from the elderly. Since they donate their brains to science, we also learn about their brains after they die.
I was amazed to see how some of these 90+ year-olds looked and moved like they were 50 years old and when asked, one 100+ year old said she actually feels like she is 50. She was the most active of them all, still walking fast without any aid, 3 miles a day except on Sunday, when it is only 2 miles. Admirable! But wait. The findings are stunning!
We all believe that being thin is healthy. Turns out the being thin is not so healthy when you get older! I am not talking obese but a little bit of extra here and there is actually healthy. So the next time you examine yourself in the mirror, consider your age before your waistline!
Another thing of surprise was the blood pressure! Most everywhere doctors tell you that your blood pressure should be 120/80 or less… may be so said 60-Minutes when you are young. But as you get older, it seems the ones who live to be 90+ have higher blood pressures than normal. Those who had normal BP died long time ago! So it seems that higher blood pressure–I don’t mean sick high–is better for you. This is also evident in the case of those who have migraines. It seems that most people with migraines have low blood pressures–I do too–and I have a hard time increasing my blood pressure to be higher. Blood pressure is probably genetic but one can tinker with that by adding more salt to the diet. I will make an effort to add more salt to increase my BP to be over 120/80 since lower BP means the brain gets less blood and that is not good for the brain!
So is our current “heart healthy” diet with low salt and low blood pressure good for us? It may be good for the heart but definitely not for the brain. So if you want to live to be a healthy 90+ and not have dementia, perhaps you should eat more salty foods than the doctor recommends and stop taking all those blood pressure medications that lower your blood pressure to be 120/80 or less. (Do not just stop please! Get your doctor’s advice on how to lower your dose if you wish to lower it! It can have catastrophic consequences if you just stop taking your heart medicine!)
Drinking alcohol and/or coffee also turned out to be good! 1-3 coffees a day and/or up to 2 glasses of any alcohol–not just red wine but any alcohol–showed to be a good thing! But the most interesting of them all–in addition to the blood pressure–was the lack of importance of the vitamins we take. It really did not matter if they took vitamins or not and what kind, all or just one or any at all. It seemed that those who lived to be healthy 90+ did not care for vitamins. They cared for social activities, dances, fun, good food, good drink, and who cares about blood pressure?!
The MRI results were also interesting because they showed that what we consider as accumulation of matter (plaques) in the brain, that has long been associated with Alzheimer’s, has in fact nothing to do with it. They found these plaques in the brains of people who had absolutely no Alzheimer’s or dementia of any kind and also discovered people who had Alzheimer’s or other types of dementia who lacked these plaques completely. Thus the feared brain plaques seem independent of Alzheimer’s or other types of dementia and may mean something we have not yet figured out or mean nothing, only broken down cells that clear out slower as a result of age.
Congratulation 60-Minutes for the fantastic segment and congratulation for all 90+ participants. AND a big congratulation to those who read this article and will be healthy 90+ as a result of stopping to listen to those doctors who still believe in the importance of low blood pressure in older age and in the importance of vitamins! Finally a report that proves that we do not need to be medicated to death to live!
Comments and questions are welcome!
Angela
Clueless Doctors & Scientists 
I only drink coffee without any topping, and usually 1 or 2 cups a day.
How can I know what my maximum daily need of water is?
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Here is a link to one of these online water calculators. Use the water calculator twice by entering in different climate (hot, cold), different humidity (humid, dry), different altitude (hi, low), different activity (some, none), etc., to get a base line minimum and maximum. Please use all options for max. High altitude = flying, storms, low barometric pressure. Fever and diarrhea = if you get sick. Our climate is changing so choose the weather as very hot or very cold, and also go for hot and humid and hot and dry: http://nutrition.about.com/library/blwatercalculator.htm
It is super cool. Do not subtract the 20% since it is not coming from your food the way it should.. unless if you eat soups and watermelon all day… 😀
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Tnx.
Good thing I’m currently not pregnant and don’t breastfeed 😛
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well… it can be changed.. 😉 If you wish! 😀
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Hmmmm, should I be careful what I wish for now?
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Yep yep! ❤
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I’ve read this today. Your thoughts?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-brown/blood-pressure-patients-y_b_8159578.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592
Yeah, yeah, I know I have to wait till you’ve moderated this 😛
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Huh? No moderation this time? Woohooooooo!
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Crap, it’s till in moderation 😀
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I don’t know if you noticed who the chairman of this study is (or was since they stopped it). He is also chair of the American Heart Association (AHA). What would make the chair of the AHA who lives off of maintaining heart disease in the population ever say that a higher blood pressure is better? That would end his job and the money the AHA is collecting. They now try hard as they can to make people believe that high BP is bad and they should lower their blood pressure; and the fact that they will get sicker… well the AHA must have a purpose and must survive. Saying that go get lower BP via medications (as the chair suggests in the Huffington Post) also supports the pharmaceutical companies since they can continue making drugs and feed the people with them, making them sicker, so they need more drugs. It is a vicious circle. The chair would not ever dare considering recommending stopping sugar!! That would end the need for AHA!!!! Instead take statins and other drugs.
Note who did the study: “The Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial, known as SPRINT, studied more than 9,300 people older than age 50 who had high blood pressure and at least one other risk factor for heart disease.” Note they already had heart disease! What caused the heart disease to start with is not mentioned or incorporated in terms of diet only what will reduce the BP once they are sick. Note also that in the Harrison Manual of Medicine under causes of hypertension salt is not mentioned but under lowering blood pressure the #1 thing they do is cut salt. Cutting salt actually makes people sicker–they end up with higher triglycerides and lack of heart muscles (and brain and body muscles) since the heart works on salt created voltage. So why don’t you hear in these trials that they tested for how much sugar the person is eating?
Well.. the answer is obvious! If they did, there would be no need to the trial… In my group we cut sugar completely and everyone (even family members who are not in the group) have perfect or low BP and no medicines.
Just cut the darned sugar out of your diet America and the world!!!
Half of all diseases (heart problems, diabetes, hypoglycemia, strokes, and most artery and cholesterol diseases would just disappear!
I believe that a neutral entity’s research findings based on a 30-year study of people (by UCI) whose brain and body are donated for research after death and who live in a controlled environment with regular medical exams twice annually by the same medical team, provides a better understanding and a truer picture than one who needs heart sick people for money and his job.
I am extremely cautious when it comes to health associations Roald in the US. I have not found one so far that is actually there to help. Every single one is there to make money and name in the process so more people will look at their websites so they can make more money even on their advertisements. They are full of false information.
I wish people would start to wake up and doctors would start to listen up.
Have you seen my new website (still under construction) where I posted one of many testimonials yesterday? It is at http://stantonmigraineprotocol.com where one of my members actually have my protocol prescribed by the doctor because all of the member’s problems are gone and all medicines also stopped. If all patients and doctors did this, it would reduce big pharma to small pharma and all the associations to no associations because they all make money on sick people and not healthy ones.
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It made sense to me as it is. But that’s just me, a simple man in the sun 😀
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lol.. read the updated one.. somewhat better information! 😀
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Yes, the updated one is much more elegant, but in essence the info is the same.
I think it depends on the reader what is picked up or not. I once showed a cigarette smoker some pictures of the lungs of a dead smoker, and he said: “Hmmmm, how do you know their blackness was caused by smoking cigarettes? Maybe he worked in a coal mine?”
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Well it is easy to tell if you actually asked the person or followed the person in life. See this is exactly what I mean. When they run the high blood pressure tests on people, they are not asking what they eat so they have no clue what may have caused the high BP. I agree with the smoker who says “how do you know their blackness was caused by smoking cigarettes? Maybe he worked in a coal mine?”. I would be asking the same question and that is precisely what researchers and doctors don’t do but should do.
I have an example for you, also from my migraine group on Facebook. A wife presented in the ER and then later admitted to the hospital for a migraine that was 10 in pain on the scale of 1-10 for several weeks. The doctors pumped medicines in her that lowered her pain to level 5 but did not much else. Her husband had my book and contacted me on Facebook.
My first question was: how much water has she been drinking?
As it turned out, she had been drinking more than twice of what her maximum daily need was of water so she had water toxicity. I informed the husband of the proper amount of water; asked him to make sure that she drank no more than that per day; he was also given information about how to enhance his wife’s electrolytes the proper way. The wife is at home recovering, no medicines, doing great.
It would only have taken 1 darn question to ask to see where the problem is! I asked the husband if anyone in the hospital had asked how much water she drank. He said: no.
No one is ever asking questions!
This already killed my mother and I consider it my duty and responsibility to teach people to force their doctors to ask questions! Better yet: have themselves ask the questions from themselves before they head off to a doctor because there is a good chance that they can solve the problem at home.
So when it comes to high blood pressure: what is causing it? Forget about treating it!
If you put your toes under the wheel of my car, the cause of your pain is my car! Your pain is a symptom so don’t treat it with pain killers for crying out loud! Move my car off your foot!
So what is the car we need to move for high BP? People are not born with high BP and even in terms of genetics, if one changes her lifestyle from her predecessors from whom she inherited high BP, like I did from all previous female members of my family, guess what: I have low BP! Genetics is only important if you follow in the footsteps in lifestyle of whom you inherited the bad stuff to start with. That way you will end up with the same disease. But you do not need to if you know what the cause is and move that monster out of the way. Genes need to be expressed to work. You can often prevent that by lifestyle!
We know that sugar is the cause of high BP… so why give a pill to reduce cholesterol instead of moving the sugar-car away?
The answer is simple: removing sugar makes a lot of people lose money: sugar lobby, sugar growers, all the people that work for them, all researchers on food to enhance the sugar point, all researchers at big pharma who work on all the diseases that sugar causes, all doctors who have nothing to do because there are very few sick people.. and the list goes on including pharmacies and the very Uber driver I hired the other day on my way to the airport who was a pharmaceutical company layoff victim having survived 12 rounds of layoffs. They are laying off already and we fighters against them just barely started!
Half of the US economy would collapse if people stopped eating sugar!
Take a look at what Americans drink to get their BP high so they can take then BP reduction meds later in life: White Chocolate Mocha Frappuccino
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yea there is! There is always some level of moderation!!! I have too many enemies… 😉
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Immediately opened a new bottle of Captain Morgan’s special edition, and a pack of salty crackers to be devoured with some delicious Engraulis encrasicolus.
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Well done. By the way I read that article you sent and not sure of the connection to this or to the other topic. Did you have something specific in mind? This study specifically said that the plaques had nothing to do with Alzheimer’s and so the article stating that plaque is potentially a marker for diabetes and that develops into Alzheimer;s makes little sense. Her work is great and I am not doubting her diabetes and Alzheimer’s connection either albeit when I was in that mental skilled nursing facility specifically for the Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia patients, diabetes among the members was next to zero there… No idea if there is a connection, but in that place with hundreds of demented people with no diabetes… could that be a coincidence? Not likely…
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