Fuel your passion to live longer and happier
When Cynthia Nixon played American poet Emily Dickinson in the 2016 movie “A Quiet Passion,” she portrayed the boundless emotional intensity that Dickinson poured into her art. Your passions can be just as artful, because they protect your ability to stay healthy and happy in your body and brain.
A recent review of multiple studies, done by Norwegian researchers and published in Brain Health, found that when you have an increased passion for something, that increases the amount of physical activity you get, leading to more social interaction and relationships, and improving cognitive resilience and your well-being. Those benefits all work together to reduce chronic stress — one of the most physically and emotionally damaging of conditions. The research also found that they work together to help preserve the neural systems in your brain’s grey and white matter and protect organ systems from wear and tear. Now that’s exciting!
Need help finding your passion? Let yourself dream — what have you always wanted to try? Then experiment with various ideas to see what is the most enthralling. According to multiple studies, passion’s health benefits, including slowing down aging, can come from being enthusiastic about almost anything, from exercising to painting, helping others, or bird watching.
You can find help identifying your passion and building a sense of purpose in Dr. Mike’s free newsletter at michaelfroizenmd.substack.com. It outlines the power of passion and seven other attributes to increase your healthy longevity. And check out the iHerb.com blog, “8 Essential Nutrients That Support Longevity.”
Fast answers about the latest intermittent fasting news
“Maybe,” “but” and “if” are useful words when you think maybe something makes sense, but you want to be cautious and you’re not sure if it’s 100% right. That makes those words very useful when you’re peppered with headlines about health news that don’t quite add up.
Take the latest data on adults who practice intermittent fasting by eating during an eight-hour window daily. An unpublished abstract presented at an American Heart Association conference says those folks are 91% more likely to die from cardiovascular disease than people who eat during a 12-to-16-hour window.
This contrasts sharply with the heart-friendly effects of time-restricted eating that have been found in other studies. So, what gives?
Do we know if those time-restricted eaters indulged in red and processed meats, sweet treats, and unhealthy fats because they thought their narrow time frame made that less risky? (It doesn’t.) Were they sedentary? Did they have depression? We don’t know.
Even the researchers acknowledge that such information is vital to form conclusions about the effect of eating patterns. So where does that leave you if you’ve embraced time-restricted eating?
Step 1: Have your doctor review your heart health risk factors and medications to determine if any form of intermittent fasting is smart for you. We recommend the well-researched five-day-a-month calorie-reduction plan — the Fasting Mimicking Diet — outlined in Dr. Mike’s book “The Great Age Reboot.”
Step 2: Enjoy plant-based, minimally processed foods and loads of fresh vegetables and fruits, lean proteins and healthy fats.
Step 3: Get daily moderate-to-vigorous physical activity.
Advocating avocados
The U.S. imports tons of avocados from Mexico — and some sources say that more than 2.7 billion pounds of those luscious green berries (yes, they are berries) are consumed by Americans every year, including more than 54 million pounds of guacamole on Super Bowl Sunday. But even so, only about 2% of Americans eat avocados daily or almost daily.
That is a shame because according to a new study from Penn State’s Department of Nutritional Sciences, published in Current Developments in Nutrition, an avocado a day keeps unhealthy foods away!
The researchers looked at the overall food choices that around 500 folks with abdominal obesity made when they ate an avocado daily and those that another 500 made when they simply ate their usual, avocado-free diet. Over a 26-week span. the avocado-eaters consumed fewer refined grains and sodium and ended up increasing their vegetable intake.
We’re betting that the healthy monounsaturated fats, fiber (10 grams in a whole avocado) and added calories (about 240 in a medium one) made folks feel full and satisfied, leading them to eat fewer unhealthy foods. And there are other benefits: Avocados deliver twice as much potassium as a banana and they increase your healthy HDL cholesterol level and improve the quality of lousy LDL cholesterol, according to Mayo Clinic.
For recipes like Avocado Tapenade Bruschetta check out Dr. Mike’s “What to Eat When Cookbook” and learn more about the benefits of avocado’s monounsaturated fats at iHerb.com’s blog “Top 3 Healthy Fats To Incorporate in Your Diet.”
Metabolic syndrome can increase your risk of cancer
You’ve probably heard the old song, “Leg bone’s connected to the knee bone/ Knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone.” Well, some connections in the body aren’t so obvious.
According to a study of more than 44,000 patients, your risk of developing cancer over the next 10 years jumps by 30% if you have metabolic syndrome. It’s diagnosed if you have any three of these conditions: high blood pressure, low levels of good HDL cholesterol, elevated triglycerides, high blood sugar and a large waistline.
The study also found that folks with metabolic syndrome and high levels of inflammation associated with C-reactive protein are specifically at risk for breast, endometrial, colon, rectal and liver cancers.
While we’ve known that metabolic syndrome is associated with an increased risk of heart disease, stroke and Type 2 diabetes, this metabolic-syndrome-cancer-connection is a new insight. (Previous studies have linked high blood pressure alone with an increased risk of some cancers.)
To avoid or reverse metabolic syndrome, step 1 is achieving and maintaining a healthy weight. That can lower your blood pressure, stabilize blood sugar, reduce inflammation and help lower triglycerides and lousy LDL cholesterol. Eliminate highly processed foods and increase the amount of walking and strength-building exercises that you get. The newest weight-loss medications such as Wegovy and Zepbound may also be helpful. Other important steps: stress management, healthy sleep habits, and quitting and/or avoiding smoke from cigarettes and vapes.
Learn all about how to adopt those healthy habits in Dr. Mike’s free newsletter at LongevityPlaybook.com and Dr. Oz’s blog at iHerb.com.
Go wild
These days, almost 50% of all fish (like salmon, branzino, catfish and rainbow trout), crustaceans (lobster and shrimp) and mollusks (clams and oysters) are farm-raised, not caught in the wild. When done correctly, that can provide a steady supply of many varieties of those tasty proteins that are in ever-decreasing supply in our oceans. But … and there is always a but … it turns out that far too often, the farm-raised swimmers are short of the healthy nutrients that are found in their wild-caught cousins.
Research published in Nature Food says that farmed salmon in particular has less calcium, iodine, iron, omega-3, a healthy fatty acid, vitamin B12 and vitamin A than wild-caught salmon. Overall, wild-caught salmon has five times more calcium than farmed salmon, and 150% more iron, omega-3, B12 and vitamin A. Such a dramatic difference in nutrients in farmed and wild-caught fish appears the case for herring and anchovies as well.
You can enjoy wild-caught Pacific coho and sockeye salmon and Arctic char (a northern cousin of salmon), along with salmon burgers made from wild salmon, in recipes like BBQ Arctic Char, Harissa-Baked Wild King Salmon Fillets and Dr. R’s Famous Salmon Burger, along with Mixed Radicchio Salad with Warm Anchovy Dressing in Dr. Mike’s “The What to Eat When Cookbook.” And learn more about omega-3s (healthy fats in salmon) and how taking supplements can help you make sure you get their benefits at iHerb.com’s blog, “Omega-3 Fatty Acids: Benefits + Why They Are So Important.”
Dr. Mike Roizen is the founder of www.longevityplaybook.com, and Dr. Mehmet Oz is global advisor to www.iHerb.com, the world’s leading online health store. Roizen and Oz are chief wellness officer emeritus at Cleveland Clinic and professor emeritus at Columbia University, respectively. Together they have written 11 New York Times bestsellers (four No. 1’s).
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