Coffee and Longevity

We are living longer, and this may be the most important trend we’ve ever experienced. It’s driven by — and it affects — everything from health to housing, money to technology, lifestyle to social policy.

When I was working, I would drink between 8 and 10 cups of coffee a day. Now that I am retired, I drink occasionally two or three cups a day. I like coffee as do many people. Coffee may extend our longevity, as cited in the following research:

A British study of 500,000 people, over a 10-year period, found that habitual coffee drinkers were less likely to die — of any cause than non-coffee drinkers in this very large study, coffee drinking was associated inversely with all-cause mortality, including in those drinking at least 8 cups per day, in both slow and fast metabolizers of caffeine, and in consumers of ground, instant, and decaffeinated coffee. The results are based on observational data and should be interpreted with caution. These results provide further evidence that coffee drinking can be part of a healthy diet and may provide reassurance to those who drink coffee and enjoy it.

A Spanish study which examined the association between coffee consumption and the risk of mortality in a middle-aged Mediterranean cohort of 20,000 people found that people over the age of 45 had a 30 percent lower risk of death for every two additional cups of coffee they drank each day.During the ten-year period, 337 participants died. The researchers found that participants who consumed at least four cups of coffee per day had a 64% lower risk of all-cause mortality than those who never or almost never consumed coffee. There was a 22% lower risk of all-cause mortality for every two additional cups of coffee per day.The researchers examined whether sex, age or adherence to the Mediterranean diet had any influence on the association between baseline coffee consumption and mortality. They observed a significant interaction between coffee consumption and age. The association was not significant among younger participants.

The Harvard School of Public Health followed 200,000 doctors and nurses over a 30-year period and linked coffee consumption to lower risk of death from heart disease, stroke, diabetes, neurological diseases and even suicide. How much lower is the risk? Drinking between three and five cups dropped the risk by 15 percent. They assessed coffee drinking using validated food questionnaires every four years over about 30 years. During the study period, 19,524 women and 12,432 men died from a range of causes.In the whole study population, moderate coffee consumption was associated with a reduced risk of death from cardiovascular disease, diabetes, neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, and suicide. Coffee consumption was not associated with cancer deaths. The analyses took into consideration potential confounding factors such as smoking, body mass index, physical activity, alcohol consumption, and other dietary factors.“This study provides further evidence that moderate consumption of coffee may confer health benefits to reduce premature death because of several diseases,” said senior author Frank Hu, professor of nutrition and epidemiology. “These data support the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Report that concluded that ‘moderate coffee consumption can be incorporated into a healthy dietary pattern.”

Stanford University School of Medicine scientists has unearthed a connection between advancing age, systemic inflammation, cardiovascular disease and caffeine consumption.Extensive analysis of blood samples, survey data and medical and family histories gathered from over 100 human participants in a multiyear study has revealed a fundamental inflammatory mechanism associated with human aging and the chronic diseases that come with it.The study implicates this inflammatory process as a driver of cardiovascular disease and increased rates of mortality overall. Metabolites, or breakdown products, of nucleic acids — the molecules that serve as building blocks for our genes — circulating in the blood can trigger this inflammatory process, the study found.

Then there was a small study at Stanford University, involving only 100 coffee drinkers but extending over several years. The study looked at the relationship between coffee drinking and the buildup of inflammation, which is a major feature of aging and contributes to so many diseases and chronic conditions. Researchers theorized that the high caffeine content in coffee acted to counteract the chemical reactions that caused inflammation.

Another possible cellular-level action was discovered in a study at the Krembil Brain Institute at the University of Toronto, which showed that coffee consumption “seems to have some correlation to a decreased risk,” of both Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease: “The secret here seems to be connected to a kind of chemical called phenylindole’s, which are created during the roasting process. These chemicals may help stop the buildup of two toxic proteins in the brain, called tau and beta-amyloid, which have been linked to both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.”

Okay, bottom line: How much coffee is enough? How much is too much?

Yet another study weighs in, this one reported in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition: “The tipping point where caffeine negatively affected cardiovascular risk is five cups.” So, if you are a coffee drinker, make sure you do not drink over five cups a day. As with any research, take the information with a grain of salt and before you increase your coffee intake, check with your medical team.

Longevity and Obseity

I found this great article relating to healthy longevity at Futurity.com. If you’re overweight… or especially obese, I recommend you read it carefully. There are many other great articles on this site.

“Among older adults, physical function of the upper and lower extremities and the ability to perform activities of daily living are key for their day to day functioning, and thus important indicators of health,” says Rahul Malhotra, an assistant professor at the health services and systems research program at Duke-NUS Medical School and senior author of the study in the Internal Journal of Obesity. 

“We investigated whether older adults with pre-obesity and obesity, versus those with normal weight, have the same or fewer years of healthy life when health is defined using these relevant indicators.”

The researchers analyzed data from a national longitudinal survey of 3,452 Singaporean adults over the age of 60. They measured the association between BMI categories (underweight; normal weight; pre-obesity; obesity) and years of remaining life with and without limitations in physical function and in activities of daily living.

They defined limitation in physical function as difficulty in completing any of nine tasks involving the arms and legs, such as walking 200-300 meters, climbing 10 steps without resting, or raising their hands above their head.

They assessed limitation in activities of daily living in terms of difficulty when doing six basic activities, such as bathing, dressing, or eating, or seven instrumental activities, such as doing housework, managing their medications, or taking public transportation.

The findings show that, at age 60, adults with obesity could expect about 6 more years of remaining life with limitation in physical function and about 5 fewer years of remaining life without this limitation compared to those with normal weight.

Similarly, in terms of limitation in activities of daily living, at age 60, those with obesity, versus normal weight, could expect 3.5 more years of remaining life with this limitation and 3.5 fewer years of remaining life without this limitation. The researchers observed the same patterns at age 70 and 80, regardless of gender, ethnicity, or educational status.

“Our study suggests that health systems, social, and community services in ageing populations need to continue focusing on promoting normal weight as well as maintaining physical abilities of older adults in order to increase healthy life years,” says coauthor Chan Wei-Ming Angelique, associate professor at the health services and systems research program.

“Obesity has been shown to have adverse effects on health and life expectancy at all ages,” says Patrick Casey, professor and senior vice dean for research. “Increasing healthy life expectancy will reduce expenditures on both health and social care.”

The team is currently conducting similar research on a new cohort of Singaporeans (beginning in 2017), who are eight to nine years younger than the participants of the current study. They plan to compare the results between the two cohorts for a better picture of how the effect of higher BMI on the years of healthy life may change over time.

Tips to Prevent Loneliness

According to Statistics Canada, as many as 1.4 million elderly Canadians report feeling lonely. And the city, Vancouver, I live in as a reputation for being less than friendly if you believe the media stories. So is loneliness a problem for seniors in Vancouver. I think it is, based on conversations at the many workshops I have given on social connectedness.

The discrepancy between an individual’s loneliness and the number of connections in a social network is well documented, yet little is known about the placement of loneliness within, or the spread of loneliness through, social networks. Results of a number of studies indicated the spread of loneliness was found to be stronger than the spread of perceived social connections, stronger for friends than family members, and stronger for women than for men.

The results advance our understanding of the broad social forces that drive loneliness and suggest that efforts to reduce loneliness in our society may benefit by aggressively targeting the people in the periphery to help repair their social networks and to create a protective barrier against loneliness that can keep the whole network from unraveling. 

There was a study that involved more than 5,000 individuals who were asked to complete a loneliness questionnaire, give a medical history and receive a physical examination every two year to four years over a ten-year period. Participants also indicated who their friends and relatives were, and many of these individuals also took part in the study. By looking at the social networks of the participants and the number of lonely days they experienced each year, researchers were able to see how loneliness spread throughout the groups. The study found that:

·       People feel lonely for approximately 48 days out of each year, on average.

·       People are about 50-percent more likely to experience loneliness if someone they are directly connected to feels lonely.

·       Women report experiencing more loneliness

·       Loneliness is more likely to spread in women's social networks than in men's.

·       Loneliness is more likely to spread in networks of friends, rather than those of family.

Loneliness can be overcome. It does require a conscious effort on your part to make a change. Making a change, in the long run, can make you happier, healthier, and enable you to impact others around you in a positive way.

Here are some ways to prevent loneliness:

·       Recognize that loneliness is a sign that something needs to change.

·       Understand the effects that loneliness has on your life, both physically and mentally.

·       Consider doing community service or another activity that you enjoy. These situations present great opportunities to meet people and cultivate new friendships and social interactions.

·       Focus on developing quality relationships with people who share similar attitudes, interests, and values with you.

·       Expect the best. Lonely people often expect rejection, so instead focus on positive thoughts and attitudes in your social relationships.

Having just three or four close friends is enough to ward off loneliness and reduce the negative health consequences associated with this state of mind.

The problem is that as we age we lose friends for many reasons, and many of us find it hard to make new friends. So tomorrow I will post a few tips on how to make new friends.

Exercise Your Way to Super Healthy Longevity

The following is from David A. Kekich, Maximum Life Foundation,  www.MaxLife.org

I hope you’re not tired of hearing how good exercise is for you. I mention it from time to time because it could be the difference between life and death for you. So here we go again. 

There is a mountain of evidence to show that regular exercise and maintaining a state of fitness is good for health and longevity. That mountain continues to grow, new papers arriving on a weekly basis to reinforce these points: don't be sedentary and don't get fat, or you'll pay the price of greater medical expenses over a shorter, less healthy life.

A few examples are linked below, spanning a range of topics including associations between fitness and age-related structural damage and decline in the brain, exercise and mortality in middle age, and exercise as a therapeutic option for the elderly.

Regular moderate exercise is among the safest of ways to influence health, and it produces an expected benefit to long-term health that is modest in the grand scheme of things But for basically healthy individuals still larger than that provided by any other available methodology aside from the practice of calorie restriction.

You can't exercise your way to living to 100, a target that less than 1% of the population will reach in the environment of today's medical science, and exercise only modestly improves your 20% odds of making it to 90 in the environment of today's medical science.

But exercise is free, available now, reliable, and backed by an enormous weight of evidence, and that makes all the difference as to whether or not to take advantage.

It is true that the future of practical, low-cost rejuvenation therapies will render academic all questions of whether or not we would gain a year in health here or a year there due to a healthier lifestyle.
We'll be gaining decades of healthy life, and losing the marks and damage of age, thanks to therapies that target the causes of degenerative aging and age-related disease.

The big question for those of us who stand today at the cusp of age and opportunity, at the whim of small chances that will spiral out to speed or slow the timeline for future medical development, is whether or not we will live long enough to benefit from rejuvenation treatments. Pure and simple… that difference can simply whether or not you exercise regularly.

That is where the year here and the year there become far more important, especially as the pace of progress in all technologies continues to accelerate.
Cardiorespiratory fitness is associated with white matter integrity in aging
Age-related decline in cerebral macrostructure, such as reductions in gray and white matter volume, is well-documented.

Exercise and dementia
The boundary or transitional state between normal aging and dementia, which is defined in various ways such as mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or a Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) of 0.5, is recognized as a state of being at high risk of dementia.

Although it is a serious challenge to control the risk of dementia in these people, pharmacological interventions remain unsuccessful. Meanwhile, recent studies have suggested potential benefits of nonpharmacological interventions.

Among a variety of nonpharmacological methodologies, most popular and potentially beneficial interventions to date include cognitive interventions (CI), physical activities (PA) and a group reminiscence approach with reality orientation (GRA).

Previous studies have suggested that exercise may be one of the promising strategies for improving cognitive functions.

Resistance as well as aerobic trainings may positively impact cognitive functioning and result in functional plasticity in healthy older adults. Furthermore, exercise training may have cognitive benefits for seniors with MCI, especially improvements in selective attention and conflict resolution, processing speed and verbal fluency in senior women with amnestic MCI.
Physical Activity Is Linked to Greater Moment-To-Moment Variability in Spontaneous Brain Activity in Older Adults

Higher cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) and physical activity (PA) in old age is associated with greater brain structural and functional integrity, and higher cognitive functioning.

In this study we extend our understanding of the different and overlapping roles of CRF and PA in brain resting state function in healthy but low-active older adults. Depending on brain region and task, greater CRF is associated with either increased or decreased change in blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal, a proxy for neural activity.

In this study, we sought to determine how the level of physical fitness (measured as CRF) and PA (measured via accelerometer) are related to functional brain health measured as SDBOLD.

To this end, we collected resting functional magnetic resonance BOLD data from 100 healthy older participants (60-80 years).

Given that: 1) advancing age is associated with decreasing SDBOLD; and 2) greater CRF, PA, and lower sedentariness are associated with better cognitive and brain health outcomes in older adults, we found that older adults who spend more time daily on light PA (LI-PA; housework, gardening, relaxed walking) and moderate-to-vigorous PA (MV-PA, e.g. jogging, walking stairs, biking) had greater SDBOLD in multiple brain regions, and this relationship was positively associated with white matter microstructure.

“No gain, no brain.”

See https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2015/08/recent-research-on-exercise-and-aging.php for the full article.

How to Live to 100...and Beyond

We are living longer and this post by by Donna Fuscaldo, Published July 31, 2012 at FOXBusiness

shows that we can live longer by making some simple changes in our routine. 

Good news: Working out seven days a week and maintaining a zero-fat diet aren’t the only ways to live longer. Going to church, taking naps and eating nuts can also add years to your life

“Diet and supplements and exercise programs aren’t what is achieving longevity,” says Dan Buettner, founder and CEO of Blue Zones Projects, which identifies happy and healthy communities across the globe. “Having a faith-based community can add four to 14 years.”

Buettner, who is also a National Geographic fellow, has trekked around the world to locate regions where people are living to be 100+ and what’s behind the citizen’s longevity. He identified five regions with long-last residents: Okinawa, Japan, Sardinia, Italy, Loma Linda, California, Nicoya, Costa Rica and Ikaria, Greece and nine characteristics that all of the people in these places share. The good news:  they are things that can be easily incorporated into anyone’s life. 

Move Around

Many of us are stuck behind a desk most days with a sedentary job, but getting up and moving can add four years to your life, according to Buettner.

“People who are making it to 100 live in environments where they are regularly nudged into physical activity.” Take the village of Okinawa, where some individuals live to 140, they spend their days getting up and down off the floor, not because they want to build their leg strength, but because they don’t have furniture.

Have Faith

It doesn’t matter the religion, being part of some form of a faith-based community can add anywhere from four to 14 years to your life.

According to Buettner, it’s not about measuring your faith, but people that attend a religious institution four times a month have less stress and less illness. Of the 263 centenarians the Blue Zones team interviewed, only five didn’t attend faith-based services.

Choose the Right Friends

Even if you think you aren’t easily influenced, who you surround yourself with can have an impact on how long you live. If your inner circle likes to drink every night, smoke or eat fatty foods, chances are you are going to partake at least periodically.

“In the five areas, no one is sitting on a bar stool or sitting on the couch watching reruns,” says Buettner. “The people are passing along positive health.”

Shift to a Plant Diet

Embracing a plant-based diet and snacking on nuts can add two to four years to your life, Blue Zones Project finds. Curbing meat intake to lean options and small portions twice a week, is a step in the right direction for a long and healthy life.

“Black beans and soy beans are the cornerstones of longevity diets around the world,” Buettner says. He adds that eating nuts—no matter the type—on a daily basis will also boost life span.

Keep Your Parents Nearby

Buettner’s research has found that keeping aging parents nearby adds anywhere from two to six years for the aging parents and lowers the mortality rate for young children.

“Kids in a home with grandparents are healthier. We warehouse our grandparents and seniors in homes at an enormous cost. This is going back to traditional values.”

Know Your Purpose

Having a reason to wake up every morning can add up to seven years to your life. Having a sense of purpose, whether it’s at work o r in your personal life, will bring you joy and reduce stress.

Buettner suggests doing an internal inventory to figure out your values, passions and talents and then come up with ways to put those skills into action.

Drink Wine…to a Limit

Drinking isn’t always bad for you as long as you do it in moderation. According to Buettner, moderate drinkers who have one to two drinks a day in social settings outlive non-drinkers.

Buettner suggests drinking Sardinian Cannonau wine and discourages against saving all of your drinks for a weekend of binge drinking.

De-stress

No matter the location, everyone is prone to stress, but it’s how you deal with it that determines your lifespan, according to Buettner’s findings.

Centenarians have found ways to de-stress, whether it’s exercise, meditation, yoga, prayer or curling up with a good book. “They have ritualistic times every day where they down shift,” says Buettner. “It either comes from prayer, mediation, happy hour and even taking a nap.” In fact Buettner says napers have 35% less cardio vascular disease than non napers. You only have to sleep two to five minutes to get the benefits, he adds.

Don’t Finish Your Plate

How much you eat is just as important as what you eat. People in the Blue Zones subscribe to the policy of only eating until they are 80% full. That means they don’t go up for seconds or eat until they are stuffed. In fact, many eat their smallest and last meal in the late afternoon or early evening.  Adopting this eating habit c

Read more:

Can Religion Make You More Optimistic?

The following is an article by Barbara Kantrowitz posted on November 11, 2011, in Health goes Strong. It has some interesting ideas, and some research that suggests that spirituality helps one view life in a more positive light. However, in my mind, I question if this will actually extend your life. Being optimistic, cannot hurt you, but to make the claim that being optimistic, because one is spiritual could extend one's life, I think is a stretch. Interesting idea though. 

Religion encourages social interaction, researchers say

There's no question that regular attendance at religious services can improve your sense of spiritual well-being but a new study says going to religious services can also improve your mental health as well and could even extend your life.

The research is relevant to midlifers because it is based on an observational study of more than 92,000 postmenopausal women over 50. They were an ethnically and religiously diverse group who participated in the Women's Health Initiative, a massive federally funded study that looked at the effects of hormone therapy on heart disease, among other things.

In the study, to be published this week in the Journal of Religion and Health, older women who attend services frequently were 56 percent more likely to be optimists than those who don't attend regular services. Women who attended services were also 27 percent less likely to be depressed.

Other studies have indicated that religious activity contributes to psychological well-being by encouraging social interaction with religious leaders, other members of other congregations or even volunteer efforts to help those less fortunate.