Quotes About Aging

Looking younger starts with not smoking and limiting unprotected sun exposure. But try as you might to protect your skin, it is programmed to thin at a rate of one percent per year after age 30.

Keeping mitochondria healthy (less sugar, less saturated fat, smaller meals, and less white fat promoting inflammation) slows down this aging process as we know it. And you end up with more energy every day. If your cells—via your power source—can become or stay much younger-acting, then your organs and systems will function much more youthfully, decreasing the chances of developing disease.

The elderly tend to get fewer colds than kids, even though they have a weakened immune system. This happens because our systems develop defenses against antigens; we acquire antibodies to the germs we've defeated in the past (stored in plasma cells in your bone marrow, as mentioned earlier in Chapter 6), and destroy those antigens and viruses before they can multiply and cause that illness.

The common challenges of earning a living, maintaining a relationship and ageing are becoming battlegrounds of existential angst and self-loathing in a culture that demands conspicuous consumption, high-octane partnerships and perpetual youth.

Maggie Smith

Women with the highest saturated fat intake had a 60–70 percent greater chance of cognitive deterioration over time. Women with the lowest saturated fat intake had the brain function, on average, of women six years younger.

Like so many other organs, the brain possesses a miraculous ability to heal itself, to forge new synaptic connections around old ones, to learn and relearn. That is, however, if you don't keep damaging it three times a day. A wholesome diet and exercise may offer your best hope for remaining sharp and healthy into your twilight years.

Earl Stadtman was quoted as saying, "Aging is a disease. The human lifespan simply reflects the level of free radical damage that accumulates in cells. When enough damage accumulates, cells can't survive properly anymore and they just give up.

You can tell whether a food is rich in antioxidants by slicing it open, exposing it to air (oxygen), and then seeing what happens. If it turns brown, it's oxidizing. Think about our two most popular fruits: apples and bananas. They turn brown quickly, which means there aren't a lot of antioxidants inside them.

There may be no such thing as dying from old age. From a study of more than forty-two thousand consecutive autopsies, centenarians—those who live past one hundred—were found to have succumbed to diseases in 100 percent of the cases examined. Though most were perceived, even by their physicians, to have been healthy just prior to death, not one "died of old age."1

Insulin treatments themselves may accelerate aging, worsen diabetic vision loss, and promote cancer, obesity, and atherosclerosis.82 Insulin can promote inflammation in the arteries, which may help explain the increased death rate in the intensively treated group.83

we're living longer, but we're living sicker.

In the control group (the group of participants who did not change their lifestyles), their telomeres predictably shrank with age. But for the healthy-living group, not only did their telomeres shrink less, they grew. Five years later, their telomeres were even longer on average than when they started, suggesting a healthy lifestyle can boost telomerase enzyme activity and reverse cellular aging.71

There may be no such thing as dying from old age. From a study of more than forty-two thousand consecutive autopsies, centenarians—those who live past one hundred—were found to have succumbed to diseases in 100 percent of the cases examined.

Are Americans living longer now compared to about a generation ago? Yes, technically. But are those extra years necessarily healthy ones? No. And it's worse than that: We're actually living fewer healthy years now than we once did. 20

In other words, we're living longer, but we're living sicker.

In other words, it wasn't the weight loss and it wasn't the exercise that reversed cell aging—it was the food.

thousand older women over a period of a dozen years and found that those who ate the most antioxidant-rich foods had the lowest stroke risk.42 Similar findings were reported in a younger cohort of men and women in Italy.43 As with lung disease,44 antioxidant supplements don't appear to help.45 Mother Nature's powers cannot be stuffed into a pill. Knowing this, scientists set out to find the most

Legumes have been found to be perhaps "the most important dietary predictor of survival in older people" around the world.

To be perfectly honest, I think that as I'm growing older, I'm just growing more impatient. I'll be very happy if at some point people say, 'Michael's grown wiser and softer in his old age.' But we'll have to wait and see what my next project is.

Aging Poem I can live with my arthritis, And my dentures fit me fine. I can see with my bifocals, But I sure do miss my mind.

You know you're getting old when you stoop to tie your shoes and wonder what else you can do when you're down there."? – George Burns

Nobody is saying that these people do not ultimately cease to be. And Sometimes their passings are even more painful than ours. It is just that so often they live till their hair is white. They make excellent corpses, among the expensive flowers … Nobody

In the central place of every heart there is a recording chamber. So long as it receives a message of beauty, hope, cheer, and courage — so long are you young. When the wires are all down and your heart is covered with the snow of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and only then, are you grown old. — GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR