2910 A healthy heart

If you're reading this, you're probably younger than me, just because of the average age of bloggers. Maybe feeling smug about that? I'm your mother's age--or gasp, your grandmother's? Touch of ageism? That's OK. I was that way too when I was in my 20s and 30s. Thought the good life was all about being young. Why, I'm not sure, since most of the really happy and secure people I knew back then were all older! They'd all successfully met challenges and were enjoying life. Go figure. I didn't know then I would live to be over 65 or be married almost 50 years--just assumed it. Most people in my family did.

It's a fact. Everyone ages; but we don't all do it the same. And it's always been that way. The maximum life span really hasn't changed much. We're saving a lot more babies, and licked many childhood diseases, so the average lifespan has changed, but we've always had the old-old. If I can trust my genealogy research, many of my great-great-greats lived well into their 80s and some into their 90s. In fact, you can't choose your parents, and for all the hoop-la about environmental hazards and mad-cow and E. coli, there's only one thing you can do that's a sure fire way to get older by extending your own lifespan.

I was born with a heart problem--an extra circuit that acted up more and more as I got older. I didn't know I had an electrical misfire, and neither did my doctors, because unless you're having tachycardia or arrhythmia while you're at the hospital or clinic for something else, no one finds it. And if you've lived with it all your life, you just think light-headedness is normal. This flaw in my circuitry was discovered 10 years ago and I was medicated to control it. I had an ablation in 2002 to destroy the circuit, was medicated again until the rhythm was right, and then since about 2004 have had the heart God intended.

Miracle of modern medicine--pharmaceutical research and surgical skill. You bet I am. But the only thing I can do personally to slow down the actual aging of my heart is caloric restriction. It is not the same as lowering my body weight. Reducing body size through exercise doesn't have the same effect. "Decreasing caloric intake by 30% or 60% significantly prolongs maximal lifespan in laboratory animals when instituted at young or middle age." [Journal of the American College of Cardiology, vol. 47, no. 2, 2006]

This is bad news for those of us raised on a typical Western diet. We want to blame the transfatty acids, or McDonald's or dirty air, or something in the water, or the Bush Administration for not funding more programs in schools, but the fact is we're in charge of prolonging our lives by reducing our caloric intake. Caloric restriction delays or prevents other problems too, not just heart problems, and I'll leave it to you to look it up. PubMed (Medline, National Library of Medicine) is free and you can get the articles at your local library.

I guess that's why the really old people we see are so skinny. With a BMI of 19.7 (the mean in human studies), people would probably think I was 90.