They are a pair–inextricably, they go together. Let me tell you why. No matter how old you are and this is from babyhood and up, to live without disease requires a strong immune system. When you reach the age of 80 the immune system, if it is strong. is your fortress of protection. It can be protecting you until the age of 100 and beyond! We can examine some of the ways of keeping that system strong. In scientific language this is know as morbidity compression.
Let me make a short list of some of the ways to keep strong, this valuable given human system.
One. Diet. We now are in an age when keeping good nutrition is hard to accomplish. We do not have the raised produce, vegetables, fruits, meat, that, in days past was easily available. And we don`t have time to raise those staples ourselves. Thus we consume what can only be described as inferior food, especially previously prepared foods, that do not sustain strong immunity. Let me give just one example of the diminution of nutritive in one vegetable, though it is actually a fruit. Tomatoes is the example. The tomatoes in cans are considered ten times more nutritive than fresh tomatoes. The reason given for that is that they are picked and canned at the peak of ripeness.
Two. Exercise. One only has to go to the market to see what is happening to human beings. We as a people are slipping into the age of obesity. The markets need more electrically driven wheel chairs and many times there are not enough to go around. Where once it was a rare exception to see one of these chairs in use, it becomes commonplace and it is no longer the paralytic or the lame in the chair. And the person in the chair is not aged. We see a tragedy in the making because the future for these people is a bleak one. This is not the good health needed to assure the promise of a long and healthy life. What we are observing, of the so called obesity pandemic, is not of our country only but is world wide and is quickly leading to diabetes in epidemic proportions.
Poor diet leads to obesity and poor health. Let us look at one factor alone which is major in weight gain. It is called high fructose corn syrup and is now the leading sweetener of all prepared foods and soft drinks. You will find, if you look at ingredients– jams jellies, cereal, canned fruits and vegetables, soda pop– the syrup in question. Sugar, which is primarily sucrose, has been replaced with the cheaper substitute derived from corn. Because high fructose corn syrup is digested and assimilated differently it is now thought to be the leading cause of weight gain in children and adults. For emphasis, I want to repeat the phrase–thought to be the “leading cause of weight gain in children and adults” Surely it would seem important to take a few seconds to look at ingredients in prepared foods we are ingesting and this, not only for high fructose corn syrup but all other contents that we will take into our bodies. Sometimes producers call this corn syrup modified corn starch to obscure and confuse.
There is scientific proof that we all lose one percent, yearly, of muscle mass after the age of 45. It happens to all of us–men, women, athletes, politicians, doctors, geniuses and idiots (and others). I believe it can be said that we also lose strength in proportion to the loss of muscle if we do not put up a retaliatory action which is called exercise and it can be of the simplest variety–like walking or bike riding or doing the squats, or running-in-place and does not require paying to go to a gym or for a personal trainer or buying expensive equipment. What it does require is discipline, self administered, and the desire to preserve the best, strongest body possible. As a preventive to weakness and fear of falling in our daily pursuits and as a contributor to pride and self image, nothing can surpass what daily exercise can give us. When clean air fills our lungs and when blood runs increasingly through the important organs and dilates the veins and arteries we are improving our health and gaining years of living happily with significant improvement as to how we look at life and its vicissitudes. Here we have looked on just a few possible improvements we might choose to make in our life styles. There are thousands of others to choose from but these few are important and can lead one to marked improvement in health and life and more time to live it, and we will look at others at a later opportunity.