The average brain shrinks about 0.5mm per year after age 50; those with Alzheimer’s may lose up to 2mm annually. This loss is “normally” accompanied by a decline in memory and mental agility. Sure, losing your mind is a “normal” part of aging. But normal is not my goal. We all know what I think about being normal, it STINKS! The fact is, your brain does not have to shrink as you get older. There are those rare individuals who have robust brains into their 80s and even 90s. If you want to be one of them, here is how you go about it.

First of all, give your brain the Omega 3 fats it needs for repair and maintenance. About 70% of your brain is made of Omega-3 fatty acids. Taking enough of LMC’s Ultra Omega will give you the raw material to work with. The next step is to stimulate your body to use that raw material for brain support.

Second, do not accept the “normal” decline of your sex hormone levels. Estrogen protects the brains of women and testosterone is equally vital for active robust mental activity in men. These are potent hormones. When used correctly they can do great good. When used inappropriately they can do great harm. If you want to find out how I think these hormones are best used, come to a free Longevity Seminar. I will spend 90 minutes telling you how I think they should be used.

Third, take a big healthy dose of B vitamins every day. I personally recommend LMC’s Optimal B. It is designed to enhance brain and nerve function, promote bone marrow activity, and inhibit the development of heart disease and high blood pressure. Several of the B vitamins have been repeatedly shown in peer-reviewed studies to be associated with lower risk of dementia and degenerative neurologic conditions.

A new study published this month in Neurology was the latest. 107 people over 60, with “normal” B-12 levels were followed for five years. Each year brain scans were performed to check brain size, B-12 levels were obtained, and level of mental acuity was measured. Remember, all of these people had normal B-12 levels. Where they were in the “normal” range had an enormous impact on their risk of brain shrinkage. If you divide them into three groups based on their Vitamin B-12 levels, the lowest 1/3 had six times the risk of brain shrinkage of those in the highest group. Never accept hearing your doctor say your test is normal. A low-normal B-12 can give you a 600% increase of risk over a high-normal B-12 level. Measure, measure, measure!

Fourth, exercise makes a difference. People who exercise 30 minutes a day cut their risk of dementia, heart disease, strokes, and cancer. Get up and move!

Finally and most important of all, become a patient of Longevity Medical Clinic. Let our doctors help keep you from losing your marbles!

What is the proper PH of your water? I’ve seen a ton of folks telling people how important it is that their water be alkaline. The reasoning here is that the PH of your body is generally alkaline (which is true and also a fancy way of saying your blood is salty), thus your water should match the PH of your body. Sadly, that oversimplifies the situation somewhat.

Before we tackle this one we need to establish exactly what is meant by “alkaline” and what exactly is “PH”. Most folks will tell you that PH is a measure of how acidic something is. They then conclude that since alkaline is the opposite of acidic, alkaline is good and acidic is bad. This view however has a few inaccuracies. First off, PH doesn’t measure acidity; rather, it measures how far it is from distilled water. The PH scale goes up to 14 with distilled water smack in the center at 7. What you have below 7 is acidic; what you have above 7 is alkaline.

So far so good. The next inaccuracy is the notion that acid is bad and alkaline is good. Certainly acid from the low end of the PH scale will melt your face but so will an alkaline solution from the top of the scale.

Just so no one gets confused on this point, 7 is safe. Any movement in either direction is a movement towards face-melting extremes. Now your body’s internal PH hovers just on the alkaline side. Before you take that as a sign to start looking for ways to raise the PH of your water, keep in mind a couple of facts.

First and foremost, your body has remarkable mechanisms to regulate its own internal PH. These mechanisms are driven far more by your nutrition than by your water. Secondly when water encounters carbon dioxide in the air it tends to form carbonic acid, dropping the PH of the water ever so slightly. Since a decent percentage of the atmosphere is carbon dioxide, it’s a pretty safe bet that most of the water humans have drunk from the beginning of time has been on the acidic side of the scale. The exception here is salt water. Sodium is an alkaline metal; when added to water will tend to move it to the alkaline side of the scale. So if you really feel the need for alkaline water, I would recommend a pinch of salt rather than an expensive device.

Last but not least, I feel compelled to point out another key point. While great importance is attached to the alkaline nature of your blood, it is important not to ignore the exceedingly low PH of your tummy, typically hovering around a face-melting, caustic, PH 2. Your PH 8 alkaline water will be thoroughly acidic by the time your tummy is done with it and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Your tummy is designed to be acidic and your body expects what it offers to be drenched in acid.

In fact, drinking water of sufficient alkalinity to raise the PH in your stomach by any appreciable degree for any extended period of time is dangerous. The results are well documented and unpleasant. First you will stop digesting and you will not be able to derive nutrients from your food. Next the food in your stomach will begin to putrefy. Finally opportunistic bacteria, which normally would have had their faces melted by your stomach acid, will begin to take up residence in your stomach, infecting and ultimately ulcerating your stomach lining.

Then once you’ve noticed the painful cramping, gassy bloating, and nausea brought on by the rotting food in your gut, you’ll likely come to a doctor like me who will have you stop drinking the alkaline water, give you some antibiotics to kill the bacteria and prescribe capsules of acid you’ll have to swallow to restore the acidic PH you never should have tampered with in the first place.

Once again, it’s time to face the hard reality people: water is good stuff, amazing stuff in terms of life science, but not magic. Nothing you do to water is going to make you suddenly healthy, full of energy, or cure your cancer. The best you can do to your water with regard to your health is to clean it. At least if your water is clean, you’re not adding insult to the injuries that time and gravity inflict on us all. Anyone who tells you their water will reverse the damages of time and gravity is trying to rob you, period.

JNM

Believe me, I sympathize. The science here gets murky and it’s easy for perfectly intelligent people to be taken in by this sort of thing. Especially when any online search for water ionizers turns up so very many sites shouting how effective it is and brimming with “testimonials” from happy customers. That’s why I’m going to dedicate this blog to examining some of these claims under the light of some basic science, starting with those pesky ionizers.

The first, and probably biggest, problem with water ionizers is simply that water doesn’t ionize. Last time I told you an ion is just an atom or molecule that has picked up an electric charge. Essentially, if you add or remove an electron, leaving a system with more or fewer electrons than protons, we call the resulting atom or molecule an ion.

Water is a fairly unique substance and is what we call a polar molecule, which is just a fancy way of saying it already has a positive charge on one side and a negative charge on the other. That’s why it makes such a versatile solvent. But when you try to add or remove an electron from a molecule of water, the whole thing tends to fall apart, leaving you with Hydrogen and Oxygen gas. If you manage to make ions, they’ll be ionized Hydrogen or ionized Oxygen. In either case you no longer have water but its base elements. I rather thought the point of these things was to purify the water, not destroy it. Moreover, if liberating Hydrogen and Oxygen from water is the point, you can accomplish it with a 12-volt battery and some wire.When people talk about ionizing water, what they usually mean is ionizing the salts and impurities in the water. Personally I’m not willing to pay $12.00 for the privilege of giving the dirt in my water an electric charge, let alone $1,200.

The next problem the proponents of ionizers fail to mention is that ions are, by their very nature, unstable. Ions might have a decent shelf life in a vacuum, but here on planet Earth they will always find a way to pick up or drop off the electrons needed to return to a state of electric neutrality. So after you’ve bought your ionizer and applied a static charge to the salt or calcium deposits in your water, chances are excellent they are no longer ionized by the time you get around to drinking it.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that they do somehow retain their electric charge. What exactly is the reasoning that water with electrically charged salt dissolved in it is somehow healthy? Water with electrical potential will not somehow magically transfer that energetic property to you. That makes as much sense as saying scuffing your feet in shag carpet is good for your health, so long as you avoid doorknobs. Electricity will not kill bacteria or viruses, it won’t remove cancer causing disinfection byproducts, and it does nothing for the taste of chlorine or fluoride.

People want easy answers, some magic remedy that will make them healthy. The hard truth is if you want to get healthy, the best first step you can take is to simply stop hurting yourself. Put down the burger, avoid the candy, and whenever possible drink clean, uncontaminated water. To that end, filters are good, reverse osmosis is better, distillation is best. For myself, I tend to go for the best, and try to offer the best to my friends and patients. That’s why I own a distiller, and why I sell them for as reasonable an amount as I can.Stick around. Next time I’m planning to write a bit on the alkaline water craze. It’s a doozy too!

Waterwise 8800 Water Purifier

Waterwise 4000 Water Purifier

“Now wait a minute!” you might say, “didn’t I just see an air purifier that uses ions being sold on this very website? Didn’t you just tell me that ions are useless?” I told you they’re not magical. Just as electricity is a pretty good way to drive a motor or light a light bulb, ions are real and useful for a limited scope of applications. The superoxide ions produced by the air purifiers are oxygen molecules with an extra electron. That extra electron is not going to cure your diseases, nor will it fill your home with a harmonious sense of well-being.

It will, however, grab onto carbon in a desperate bid to become electrically neutral and do it in such a way that it will tend to pull bacteria, viruses, mold spores, and those bad smelling volatile organic compounds, right apart. It will also cling to dust and pollen the same way it clings to your T.V. screen. With the added weight, they will settle right out of the air. In fact, recent research has shown superoxide ion production in your body to be one of the key mechanisms behind how your own antibodies fight disease and may one day allow us to create a universal antibiotic that can treat any bacterial infection. Of course that’s still a long way off. Our air purifiers just clean the air. But they clean the air exceedingly well—like no other air purifiers I can find—which is why I own two of them and think you should too.

Airwise Air Purifiers

Eat Fish, Omega 3 Fatty Acids: The neurons and receptors of the retina are in a constant state of repair and replacement. Among the critical raw materials used in the process are the omega-3 fatty acids. These lower both the risk of getting Macular Degeneration and slow its progression. The higher your omega-3 intake the less chance you will get the disease. If you have the disease it is your best defense against progression. Eat fish; taking Omega-3 supplements cut your risk by 37%.

Lose Weight: There is a clear association between body fat and risk of getting, as well as the rate of progression of AMD. People with a BMI (body mass index) over 25 have a risk of AMD that is close to 2.4 times as high as those with body mass indexes below 25. Get skinny!

Avoid fat in your diet, even vegetable fat! This one surprised me! High animal fat intake increased the risk of AMD by about 2.3 times the people with the lowest fat consumption. A group at the Harvard school of Public Health published a paper looking at fat intake and AMD. For about 4½ years they followed people who already had mild AMD and looked closely at their diets during that period. They found a clear and convincing pattern. The more fat people ate the higher their risk of AMD…. Rats! Those with the highest intake of vegetable fat also increased their risk by a factor of 3.8 times the lowest group. My mother never told me that vegetable oil would make me go blind! Ok, that’s an overstatement. In this study the one exception to the “oil makes you blind” mantra was fish oil. The more fish the participants ate and the more omega-3 they supplemented, the lower their risk. This explains why I talk about Longevity’s Ultra Omega all the time. Buy Ultra Omega

Eat fruits and vegetables, especially the dark pigmented ones. Those with the highest intake of fresh fruit and vegetables had a 47% reduction in risk of AMD.

Supplement your diet: The carotenoids, specifically lutein and zeaxanthin, as well as vitamin C and zinc have consistently been associated with lower risk of AMD. The levels of these supplements found in our Basic 6 are higher than those used in the studies. So if you are a patient already using your Basic 6, you do not need to add anything else.

Glycemic index matters: Total carbohydrate intake does not seem to matter. But people who eat foods with the highest glycemic index have the highest risk! Processed baked foods such as commercial cookies, cakes, and pastries lose on two fronts. They are high glycemic load foods which raise insulin levels and accelerate AMD. They also have high loads of vegetable fats.

Exercise is good medicine: No, this is not just a restatement of the body fat issue. Even when adjusted for body fat, the more you exercise the lower your risk of AMD.

Avoid cigarette smoke: The odd thing in these studies is that the smokers themselves increased their risk by 1.5 times vs. that of non-smokers. But non-smoking family members who are exposed to second-hand smoke increased their risk by 1.8 times that of the controls. So smoking is not only bad for your eyes but it is even worse for your family’s eyes.

Consume wine in moderation: Moderate wine consumption, but not other liquors, was found to reduce AMD by about 19%.JNM

There are something over 200 types of toad in Genus Buffo on the planet. Most of them are toxic to some degree and many are fatal to anything that eats them, (except for a few types of snake that are immune to the toxins.) The toads secrete venom from a series of glands on their skin. The biggest glands are on their backs close to their ears. Yes, toads have ears. But there are also smaller venom glands closer to the hips and on what would be the calves and forearms if they were people. Any human that touches these parts of their bodies can absorb enough venom to get very sick or even die. So naturally the self-destructive among us cannot wait to get this stuff in their system.Sometimes I wonder….Is there intelligent life on Earth?JNM