HEALTHY AT 100 (26 page)

Everything about the exhibit implied scientific truth. It was held in the Museum of Science, and it involved an impressive array of complex and nonhuman technologies: the photo taken by a robot eye with no human involvement, the computer-driven graphics, the “interactive” button that produced an aging effect forward and then reversed it if you went backward.

What did the children see? As the “years” went by, the computer added grotesque pouches, reddish skin, and blotches to their familiar features. Their faces sagged and distorted, becoming increasingly repulsive.

When the children emerged from the booth, they were shaken. One eight-year-old girl within the hearing of a
Boston Globe
reporter moaned, “I don’t want to get old.” When author Margaret Gullette interviewed children as they exited, she asked, “What did you learn?” The answer was always the same: “I don’t want to get old.”
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Whatever the people who designed the booth intended, the message that came across to the children was that regardless of the choices they might make in their lives, regardless of how they eat or whether they exercise, and regardless of the kind of people they become, they will inevitably become ugly as they age. The message they received was that with each passing year, their appearance would become, predictably and inescapably, more and more repulsive. The title of the exhibit spoke with finality, leaving no room for the impact of the way the children would live their lives. “This is the way all faces age,” it told them.

In real life, of course, as people age, their faces change in concert
with the way they live, the way they think, and the way they feel. As we age, our faces and bodies become historical repositories of our experience. I’ve known elders whose faces are scowls, bitter and mean, and I’ve known elders whose faces glow with wisdom, joy, and deep human beauty. Over the course of their lives, their faces have become the outer expressions of the attitudes toward life they have held and from which they have lived.

In England, similar computer wizardry is now being used for a very different purpose. In dramatic contrast to the “Face Aging” booth, the point is to encourage children and families to adopt more healthful lifestyles. Overweight children and their parents are being shown what the youngsters will look like in middle age
if
they continue to eat junk food and not exercise. Child health experts are overseeing the experiment for a BBC3 reality TV show titled “Honey, We’re Killing the Kids!”

Julie Buc is a mother whose family took part in the show. Her children, Jason, aged ten, and Joanna, aged eight, loved eating fried food and candy, and drank up to two liters of soda pop a day. They typically ate their food while watching TV, and they were seriously overweight.

A team of experts assembled by the TV program used high-tech computer graphics to show how the children would look as adults
if
they continued in their current ways. Julie said she was shocked by the images she saw. “All those years that we’ve been giving the children what they want has got to change,” she said.

Motivated by what they saw, and assisted by a team of nutritionists provided by the TV program, the family adopted a much more healthful diet and began to exercise far more. Gone were the soft drinks, sweets, and fried foods; in their place salads, fruits, and vegetables were introduced. The family began eating their meals together, without watching TV.

How did the kids like the changes? Ten-year-old Jason said, “It’s been really good eating at the table, and I think it’s good for the family to tell each other what they’ve been doing during the day.”

At the end of the project, the family father, Jimmy Buc, said, “The most important things to me are my wife and my children, and I want my children to be successful. I hope they will be now, because we have changed, and there’s no way we will be going back.”

Shows like “Honey, We’re Killing the Kids!” are needed, because all too often in modern society people believe there is nothing they can do to prevent themselves from deteriorating as they age. Burdened by such beliefs, they never find out who they could have been. They expect their passion to wane, their waistlines to enlarge, and their joy in life to diminish. Then they find themselves ensconced in lifestyles that end up producing the very outcomes they believed, falsely, to be inevitable.

As a result, as people in modern industrialized societies grow older they typically experience a predictable set of changes. They lose muscle mass and become weaker, their basal metabolic rate slows down, they lose aerobic capacity, their blood pressure rises, they lose some of their blood-sugar tolerance, their cholesterol levels worsen, their bone density decreases, and their ability to stabilize their internal body temperature is impaired. So common are these patterns of impairment that scientists now use them as measures of biological aging, called
biomarkers.

But studies at the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University have shown that the decline of these biomarkers is far from inevitable. In fact, much of it can be reversed.
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Take muscle strength, for example. Many people consider a decline in muscle strength to be an unavoidable part of aging. The average American begins to lose 6.6 pounds of muscle with each decade after young adulthood, and the rate of muscle loss accelerates as they get older, particularly after age forty-five. But a great deal of research has found that with proper exercise, muscle strength and size can be not only maintained but increased at almost every age.

In one study at the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging, twelve men between the ages of sixty and seventy-two were put on regular supervised weight-training sessions three times a week for
three months. They were asked to train at 80 percent of their “one repetition maximum,” the heaviest weight they could lift at one try. At the end of the experiment, the strength of the men’s quadriceps had more than doubled, and the strength of their hamstrings had tripled. By the end of the program, many of these older men could lift heavier boxes than could the twenty-five-year-olds working in the laboratory.
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What about the really old? Could they also benefit from such a program? In another study, gerontologists at Tufts University put residents of a chronic-care hospital, almost all of whom were over the age of ninety, on a weight-training program. Did this sudden introduction to exercise exhaust or kill these frail and fragile people? Hardly. Eight weeks later, wasted muscles had grown stronger by 300 percent, and both balance and coordination were much improved. Subjects who had needed assistance to walk could now get up by themselves and go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
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These and many other studies are clearly showing that the prevailing belief that we should “take it easy” as we age needs to be reconsidered.

Two of the world’s foremost experts on exercise, diet, and healthy aging are Irwin H. Rosenberg, M.D., and William Evans, Ph.D. Dr. Rosenberg was director of the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging from 1986 to 2001 and is the former chairman of the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences and the former president of the American Society of Clinical Nutrition. Dr. Evans served as the chief of the Human Physiology Laboratory at the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging, is a fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine, is the author of more than 160 publications in scientific journals, and has been exercise advisor to many professional sports teams, including the New England Patriots and the Boston Bruins. In 1991, Drs. Rosenberg and Evans coauthored the book
Biomarkers: The Ten Determinants of Aging You Can Control.

These two authorities believe that to a far greater extent than most people realize, muscle is responsible for the vitality of your body. A high muscle-to-fat ratio, they point out, causes your metabolic rate—the rate at which you burn calories—to increase. This
means you can more easily burn body fat and alter your body composition even further in favor of beneficial muscle tissue. When your metabolic rate slows down, on the other hand, it becomes much more difficult to lose weight and far easier to pack on the fat. Building muscle automatically reverses this tendency, making it easier to stay lean.

The reason is that muscle burns more calories than fat, even at rest. A pound of muscle burns roughly 15 more calories a day than a pound of fat. If you lose ten pounds of fat and gain ten pounds of muscle, you would thereafter burn 150 more calories a day without increasing your exercise level. Over the course of a year, this would translate into a difference of twelve pounds of body weight.

In actuality, the difference is even greater, because when people have more muscle and less fat, they want to exercise more and find it easier to do.

But that’s only the beginning. Studies have shown that exercise regimens that build muscles produce a cascade of positive health effects. Rebuilding and maintaining muscle strength helps you to preserve your aerobic capacity, to keep your blood pressure low, to retain a healthy blood-sugar tolerance, to maintain healthy cholesterol, to sustain the mineral density of your bones, and to stabilize your body’s ability to regulate its internal temperature.

Aerobic capacity (also called “maximal oxygen intake” or “work capacity”) is a fundamental measure of the health of your cardiopul-monary system—your heart, lungs, and circulatory mechanisms. Simply put, your aerobic capacity is your body’s ability to process oxygen. It includes your ability to breathe amounts of air into your lungs for aeration of your blood, and your ability to transport oxygen effectively to all parts of your body through your bloodstream. Elders in Abkhasia, Vilcabamba, Hunza, and Okinawa retain most of their aerobic capacity, even into their nineties. But by age sixty-five, the average American has lost 30 to 40 percent of his or her aerobic capacity. Increasing your muscle-to-fat ratio increases your aerobic capacity—and the health of your entire cardiovascular system.

One of the worst things about inactivity is that it reduces your cells’ oxidative capacity (the ability to burn oxygen). This is why many older people who have lived typical Western lifestyles experience
chronic fatigue. But it doesn’t have to be that way. As your blood circulates, carrying its vital oxygen load, it flows from your large arteries into tiny capillaries. Aging and inactivity slow down capillary growth, with the result that the supply of oxygenated blood reaching your muscles and other tissues declines. But as Drs. Rosenberg and Evans repeatedly point out, whether you’re young or old, regular exercise will improve your body’s capillary density. The result is a happy one: muscles awash with a rich supply of blood.

There’s yet another biomarker for physiological aging that can be reversed by regular exercise: glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity. For most people in modern society, the body’s ability to use glucose in the bloodstream declines with age. As people develop more body fat and less muscle, their muscle tissue becomes less and less sensitive to insulin. As a consequence, it takes more and more insulin to have the desired effect. Once again, though, increasing your muscle-to-fat ratio can reverse this deterioration, improve your blood-sugar tolerance, keep your insulin sensitivity high, and greatly reduce the chances you’ll ever develop diabetes.

Drs. Rosenberg and Evans consider creeping blood-sugar intolerance to be one of the most devastating of all the so-called age related changes. To avoid this problem, they say, keep your muscle-to-fat ratio high. And to do that, they say you should “eat much less dietary fat and more fibrous carbohydrates, such as raw vegetables and whole grains…and do strength-building exercises.”
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This advice could not be more congruent with the lifestyles of the world’s healthiest and most long lived peoples. The Abkhasians, Vil-cabambans, Hunzans, and elder Okinawans all eat little dietary fat, basing their diets on high-fiber carbs such as raw vegetables and whole grains. They don’t belong to gyms or lift weights, but their daily lives are at every stage and age full of strength-building exercise. As a result, they remain lean, strong, and healthy as they age. Even the elderly have strong muscles, carry no extra body fat, and have high muscle-to-fat ratios.

Most people in the modern world, however, gain fat as they age even if they aren’t gaining weight. Their musculature shrinks while fat tissue accumulates. This is particularly true in sedentary people.

In the United States and similar societies today, the average twenty-five-year-old woman has 25 percent body fat. If she’s sedentary, by the time she’s sixty-five her body-fat level will rise to 45 percent. And a similar pattern holds for men. The average American man at age twenty-five has about 18 percent body fat. If he’s sedentary, by sixty-five he will have nearly 40 percent body fat.
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But such unhealthy developments do not have to occur. Studies at the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University and elsewhere have repeatedly shown that by following a low-fat, plant-based diet made up of whole natural foods, and by getting regular and vigorous physical exercise, it is entirely possible to keep your body-fat level low, your muscle-to-fat ratio high, and your weight at a healthy level.

A cautionary note: A certain amount of body fat is necessary for energy storage and to cushion your vital organs. You may have seen competitive bodybuilders who have used synthetic steroids in their effort to build gigantic muscles and reduce their body fat to an absolute minimum. They may look impressive, but they are seriously jeopardizing their health.
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Other than such extreme cases, though, it remains a fact that
for most of us in the industrialized world, increasing the strength of our muscles and decreasing the amount of body fat we carry around is one of the most meaningful steps we can take on the path to healthy aging.