Researcher s at Tufts University , where the federal
government sponsors a major center for the study of human aging, have
demonstrated that the major symptoms of biological aging can be improved
through increased activity (the ef fect is boosted with secondary emphasis on
improved diet). Two Tufts scien tists, William Evans and Brian Rosenber g,
have outlined these findings in their book Biomarkers. The title refers to the
ten markers for age that are now considered reversible:
Lean body (muscle) mass
Strength
Basal metabolic rate
Body fat
Aerobic capacity
Blood pressure
Blood-sugar tolerance
Cholesterol/HDL ratio
Bone density
Body temperature regulation
These markers typically grow  worse as people age. There  are many
variations from  individual to individual; yet before the Tufts findings
emer ged, normal aging was defined to include the following:
  1. Muscle mass. The average American loses 6.6 pounds of muscle
with each decade after young adulthood; the rate of loss increases
after age 45.  2.  Strength. Older people are less strong because bundles of
muscles and motor nerves (called “motor units”) have been
deteriorating. Between the ages of 30 and 70, the average person
loses 20 percent of the motor units in the thighs, with simil ar
losses in all the large and small muscle groups elsewhere in the
body . 3. Basal metabolic rate. The body’ s metabolic rate—how many
calories it needs to sustain itself—declines by 2 percent per
decade after age 20. 4. Body fat. Between the ages of 20 and 65, the average person
doubles his or her ratio of fat to muscle. Sedentary lifestyle and
overeating can raise this ratio even more. 5. Aerobic capacity . By age 65, the body’ s ability to use oxygen
efficiently declines by 30 to 40 percent. 6. Blood pressur e. The majority of Americans show a steady
increase of blood pressure with age. 7. Blood-sugar tolerance. The body’ s ability to use glucose in the
bloodstream declines with age, raising the risk for type II
diabetes. 8. Cholester ol/HDL ratio. Total cholester ol tends to rise in both
men and women until around  age 50, and the “good” HDL
cholesterol that protects the body against heart disease loses
ground to the “bad” LDL cholesterol that increases heart-attack
risk. 9. Bone density . Calcium  tends to be lost from  bones with age,
making the skeleton weaker , less dense, and more brittle. This
tendency , if it goes too far , becomes the disease osteoporosis. 10. Body temperatur e regulation. The body’ s ability to maintain a
steady internal temperature of 98.6 degrees F. declines with age,
making old people more vulnerable to both hot and cold weather . When the Tufts team discovered that all ten biomarkers could be reversed
in older people, they delivered a sweeping endorsement of the benefits of
exercise. Evans and Rosenber g feel that the first two marke rs—muscle
mass and strength—are the most important, because the body’ s tendency to
double its fat and lose half its muscle mass by age 65 or 70 creates many ofthe other problems of metabolism. Traditionally , one of the classic markers
of growing old has been a decline in lean-body mass, a medical term for all
tissues that are not fat—i.e., bones, muscles, and vital or gans. With each decade of life after young adulthood, the average American
loses 6.6 pounds of lean-body mass. Many people who become increasingly
overweight after middle age assume that their problem is too much fat. To
the Tufts researchers, the actual problem is a combination of too much fat
and too little lean-body mass, particularly muscles. Fat and musc le tissue do
not share the same metabolism; comparatively , fat is much more inactive. It
serves as an energy-storage tissue, while muscle is an energy-spending
tissue. If you were a member of prehistoric hunter -gatherer society , having a
thick layer of body fat would be useful. Stored energy gives the body a fuel
reserve for times of famine, and its insulating capacity preserves body
warmth in winter . Because it is much less active biological ly, fat suits
modern life poorly , however; it requires many fewer calories than muscle
tissue to maintain itself (this is also true of the other components of lean-
body mass, bones and vital organs, but to a lesser degree). Someone with
more muscle than fat will have a faster metabolic rate and thus can eat
larger meals without gaining weight. Gerontologists have found that muscle is much more responsible for the
body’ s overall vitality than most people, including most doctors, ever
supposed. Based on their research, Evans and Rosenber g hold that muscle
mass, along with strength, is critical—that by building muscles late in life,
old peop le can significantly rejuvenate their whole physiology . Since the
rate at which you lose lean-body mass accelerates after age 45, the Tufts
team concentrates on full-scale exercise programs for the 45 + age groups,
reversing our social programming, which says that vigorous physical
activity belongs to the young. Previously , a decline in muscle  strength was considered inevitable with
increasing age. Bundles of musc les throughout our bodies are connected to
the central nervous system by motor nerves. Together , nerves and muscles
make up “motor units,” and by looking at cross-sections of muscle tissue,
physiologists determined that motor units are lost with age.The Tufts group conclusively proved that this trend can be reversed. Twelve men between the ages of 60 and 72 were put on regular supervised
weight-training sessions three times a week for three months. They were
asked to train at 80 percent of their “repetition maximum,” the heaviest
weight they could lift at one try. At the end of the experiment, the men’ s
strength had increased dramatic ally, the size of their quadriceps had more
than doubled, and their hamstrings had more than tripled. By the end of the
program, these older men could lift heavier boxes than could the 25-year -
olds working in the laboratory . Milder weight-training programs for people
over age 95 proved equally successful. The clear implication is that our notions about “taking it easy” as we age
need to be reexa mined. The same exercise regimen that builds muscles has
a holistic effect, helping to bring the other biomarkers into line. Blood
pressure and blood-sugar tolerance improved, the typical metabolic decline
of old age was reversed, and the body’ s ability to regulate its internal
temperature stabilized. Physical fitness is also intimately linked to one’s
general well-being; although it wasn’ t their primary goal, the Tufts team
was gratified to find that their subjects felt much younger and much better
about themselves than they had in years. How much exercise is needed to attain these benefits? In the laboratory ,
the kind of activity varied widely depending on what was being studied: As
little as twenty minutes of walking three times a week improved the
cholesterol/HDL ratio, but to be most effective, exercise has to be tailored
to the individual, taking weight, age, and fitness into account. If we look
back in history , the benefits of lifelong physical activity were evident even
in ancient times. Ancestral humans in hunter -gatherer societies stood tall
and erect. They had excellent bones and muscles, which they preserved at
all ages (the widespread incide nce of arthritis is one glaring exception to
this; osteoporosis, however , was virtually unknown). Everyone remained fit
and physically active througho ut their lives. Compare this with modern
America, where health promoters boost the concept of being “fit for life,”
while statistics reveal that 40 percent of American adults are completely
sedentary (the percentage is much higher for the elderly) and only 20
percent can be considered active in any reasonable sense.The Value of Balance
Before you decide that hard work is the way to prevent aging, consider that
“work” as defined by physics is not synonymous with sweat and strain. Work is needed to create orderliness and oppose the force of entropy . Exercise has a quantum effect, regardless of how much or little you do, by
giving the body a chance to restore subtle patterns of funct ioning. The
quantum nature of exercise has emer ged slowly , through bits and pieces of
research. In the 1960s a Swedish physiologist named Bengt Saltin wanted
to observ e the effects of comple te bed rest on the human body . The standard
advice to seriou sly ill patients had always been to recuperate  in bed, yet
there was some doubt about whether this advice was sound. Saltin asked
five young men, ranging in condition from extremely fit to sedentary , to
remain lying in bed twenty-four hours a day for three weeks. At the end of
that time he was astonished to discover that all his subjects, regardless of
their physical condition previou sly, suffered a decrease in aerobic capacity
that was equal to twenty years of aging. This was a striking finding, but the most fascinating part is that when
each subject was allowed to stand up out of bed for five minutes a day,
almost the entire  loss of function was prevented. They did not have to move
around or in any way use their muscles. The simple exposure to a quantum
force—gravity—allowed their bodies to remain normal. In a later U.S.
study , female runners were tested to see if hard physical exercise helped
prevent osteopo rosis. The best protection against the disease, some experts
feel, is not supp lemental calciu m or estrogen replacement but building up
good bone density in younger years. Since bones get stronger as more
weight is brought to bear upon them, long-distance running should increase
bone density in the legs by a considerable amount. The application to aging
goes beyond osteoporosis, which is an extreme form of bone thinning. Short
of acquiring this disorder , old age brings thinner bones in most people, and
among the very elderly , hip fractures strike one out of three women and one
out of six men. At the Tufts aging center , the bone density of a group of young women
runners was compared with that of women who did no regular exercise. Even though they were 20 percent lighter than the nonrunners, the runnersstill had stronge r leg bones. This made sense considering that the runners’
leg bones were doing more work and bearing more weig ht, but the
researchers were  startled to find that the runners’ forearm bones were also
denser , despite the fact that these bones received no extra weight at all. Somehow the whole skeleton shared the message to deposit more calcium
into the bone tissue, thanks to chemical signals (probably in the form of
hormones) that were triggered at the quantum level. The whole body knew
that exercise was being taken. In quantum terms, whatever promotes orderliness is beneficial in
opposing entrop y. The entire physiology is an island of negat ive entropy;
therefore our efforts need to be directed holistically to preserving
orderliness in every aspect. Because the body uses both creation and
destruction to keep its vital processes going, doing constant work is not the
answer . Exercise has to be balanced by rest, because there is extensive
muscle destruction during exerc ise that needs to be restored in periods of
rest. In every area of life the key is balance, a very general term that can be
broken down into four headings:
Moderation means not going to extremes. Regularity means following a
consistent routin e. Rest means rest. Activity means activity . These four
things sound simple, but, being the only species gifted with self-awareness,
only humans have conscious control over them. The cycle of rest and
activity in lower animals is dictated by instinct, which humans are free to
override. If we override it in the wrong direction, then we actually hasten
entropy . This has become appa rent in the worst aspects of modern life,
which paradoxically blends increased creature comfort with mounting
disorder . A striking example of how our bodies reflect the imbalance of our
lifestyle is heart disease, the major affliction of the elderly in our societyand the cause of more deaths than all other diseases combined. In the 1920s,
cardiology emerged as a flourishing specialty in direct response to the
alarming epidem ic of heart attac ks that was mysteriously sweeping through
our society . The epidemic wors ened without check for another fifty years,
and when it finally abated sometime in the late 1960s, there was little
agreement over what had happened. We are still asking ourselves why
Americans, second only to the Finns, suffer more coronaries than any other
people in the world. William Osler , a founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School and the most
famous physician in America at the turn of the century , noted that in ten
years of practice at one hospita l he saw no cases of angin a pecto ris, the
typical chest pain that indicates the presence of heart disease. In seven years
at Johns Hopkins, Osler saw a total of four angina cases. Today , every
cardiologist sees that number in an hour. The incidence of heart attacks
doubled in this country every two decades after 1900. Dr. Paul Dudley
White, the most eminent cardiologist in the generation after Osler ’s,
believed that the epidemic was due primarily to two changes that had taken
place in America during this century—the enormous acceleration in the
pace of everyday life and a “general enrichment of the diet.”
“Enrichment” basically means more fat. In the 1920s and afterward,
foods such as butter , cream, and beefsteak became available not just to the
wealthy but to everyone. The quickening pace of life was due to the
increasing use of the automobile, which vastly accelerated the time in
which people reached their destinations and thus gave another impetus to
“the disease of being in a hurry.” Clearly , these two great changes fitted
people’ s desires  for a materially  better life. An Irish immigran t who could
put steak on the table in place  of cabbage and potatoes thought he was
improving his family’ s lot; to replace the horse and buggy with a Model T
was a goal everyone shared. Our increased consumption of red meat and other foods high in saturated
fats, such as milk, cheese, ice cream, and eggs, has been particularly
unbalanced. If you plot the incidence of heart attacks, arteriosclerosis,
breast cancer, and colon cancer in the countries of the world, you will see
that certain countries will tend to fall to the bottom end for nearly every
disease—Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, El Salvador , Sri Lanka—while othersrise to the top— the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany . Now , if you
graph the count ries of the world according to how much milk, red meat,
eggs, and cheese they consume, the same distribution will occur . The
nations with low disease rates turn out to be those where there is very little
consumption of high-fat foods, while the societies with the richest diets
have catastrophic rates of heart attacks, hardening of the arteries, and
cancer . Achieving cardiovascular fitness also became much more difficult in our
leisure society , where pleasures such as radio, television, and movies are
more enticing, at least superficially , than exercise. To begin with, exercise is
artificial. Until the twentieth century, people were intensely active whether
they liked it or not. Before America became a mechanized society , the
concept of exercise for its own sake was all but unknown, since everyday
life contained an enormous amount of physical activity . Advising a farmer ’s
wife to take up aerobics would have been laughable. As late as 1900,
human labor accounted for 80 percent of the total calories expended to
work the land, despite the fact that tractors and combines were already in
widespread use. Today , when nearly all agriculture is mechanized, human
labor accounts for only 1 percent of the total calories expended. To resume
the normal activity the body needs, we all must consciously oppose the
trend toward increased physical leisure. Other , more intangible changes  stand out equally . Before 1920, half of
Americans lived in small towns, chiefly on farms; after that date, the
majority lived in cities. (The migration to urban areas continues, although
there is some indication of a backlash with the movement of middle- to
upper -class families back to rural areas. They are not going back to work
the farm , howev er, but for cleaner air and less noise than they found in the
city.) People’ s lives are no longe r paced by the rising and setting of the sun. We get up and go to bed when we like; we work in offices, out of contact
with the open air. If we wish, we can work all night. More important, we do
not labor for ourselves but are frequently tied to someone else’s goals. Corporations set timetables and deadlines, assign job tasks and descriptions,
and ef fectively keep decision-making in the hands of the privileged few . The fact that modern life tends to be so unbalanced, in defiance of the
body’ s innate needs, is not lost on the physiology . Your body sendsunmistakable messages whenever its needs aren’ t being met. The stomach
says it’s too full; muscles tremble when pushed beyond their strength. People who pay attention to the instincts of their bodies, who try to flow
with daily activity rather than push and rush, have a better chanc e of setting
a natural rhythm, despite to modern life’ s few physical requirements. The overall benefit of a balan ced lifestyle emer ged in 1965, when a
Southern Califo rnia research team headed by Nadia Belloc and Lester
Breslow , now dean of public health at UCLA, decided to follow the aging
patterns of people in Alameda County . A twenty-three-page lifestyle
questionnaire was handed out to almost seven thousand subjects asking
them in great detail about their health status and lifestyle. After five and a half years, 371 subjects had died. By looking back at the
original response to these questionnaires, researchers discovered that the
most important distinguishing feature of those who survived was not their
income, physic al condition, or genetic inheritance, but a handful of
extremely simple lifestyle habits:
  1. Sleeping seven or eight hours a night
  2. Eating breakfast almost every day
  3. Not eating between meals
  4. Normal weight—i.e., not more than 5 percent underweight, and
no more  than 10 to 20 percent overweight (the lower number was
for women, the higher for men)
  5. Regular physical activity—i.e., engaging often in active sports,
long walks, gardening, or other exercise
  6. Moderate drinking—i.e., taking no more than two alcoholic
drinks a day
  7. Never smoking cigarettes
This is a very brief list of balanced habits, the kind children learn at their
mother ’s knee, yet they led to dramatic conclusions. Analyzing the
statistics, Belloc found that a 45-year -old man who observed from zero to
three healthy habits could expe ct on average to live another 21.6 years,
while someone who followed six or seven good habits could expect to live
33 more years. In other word s, doing something as simple as eating
breakfast, no matter what kind of breakfast, and getting enough sleep addedmore than 11 years to a man’ s life (by comparison, having both sets of
parents and grandparents live to age 80 increases one’s life expectancy by
only about 3 years). The cumulative  results were not quite as dramatic for women, but the
same pattern was observed at all age levels. A 45-year -old woman who
followed at least six good habits  could expect to live 7.2 years longer than a
woman who followed fewer than four; this increased to 7.8 years by age 55. As impr essive as these figures are, they become much more so when we
look beyond survival to overall  health. A person in late middle age (55 to
64) who practiced all seven good habits was found to be as healthy as
young adults 25 to 34 years old who followed only one or two. The trend held good for older age groups as well. If someone followed all
seven good habits, his health at age 75 was comparable to that of someone
in his thirties or forties who neglected good habits. What seems to pay off is
sheer regularity—the kind of diet or physical activity being followed was
not taken into consideration. (By comparison, similar population studies
from Southern California have shown that people over age 65 who take
large doses of vitamins and adhere to strict health-food diets did not gain
any significant advantage in life expectancy .) The UCLA researchers furthe r noted that older subjects in general
followed a healthier lifestyle, implying that those who didn’ t had already
died at younger ages. This is consistent with the Surgeon General’ s estimate
that two-thirds of the illness suffered in old age is preventable. At the top of
the list for those  who died earlie st in the study were sedentary lifestyle and
smoking. Overall, the study showed that as people with good habits moved through
life, they could expect to enjoy an advantage in health of thirty years over
those who had bad habits. Almost three decades after the UCLA study , no
one has challeng ed its major conclusion: A balanced lifestyle is one of the
most important steps toward retarding the aging process. What we want to
do now is to probe into the deeper mechanics of balance to see if this
beneficial effect can be improved. The human body thrives on orderliness,
but the ultimate  responsibility for creating order out of disorde r rests with
each cell. The secret of keeping  destruction at bay is revealed only at theinvisible level where intelligence is constantly preserving the balance of
life. OceanofPDF .comTHE FLOW OF INTELLIGENCE:
Preserving the Balance of Life
By them selves, the body’ s molecules have no intelligence. There is nothing
“smarter” about oxygen or hydrogen just because it is being cycled through
a human cell. The same sugar molecules that sit inertly in a sugar cube are
found, with minor variations, inside DNA, but in us, sugar comes alive. The
basic fuel of the body is glucose, or blood sugar , which is the brain’ s only
food. Burning a sugar cube over a gas flame yields a flash of light and heat
and a greasy lump of carbon, but the same sugar burned in the brain
produces all the thoughts and emotions we have. The Sistine Chapel,
Paradise Lost,  and Beethoven’ s Ninth are all accomplishments of burning
sugar; so is this book and your ability to read it. Beginning with DNA, RNA, and the enzymes they produce, our cells
teem with molecules that react with precise orderliness, but this fact is
misleading—the real decisions are made by the body’ s intelligence, which
is invisible. It acts as the choreographer who invents every step of the dance
but prefers not to appear center stage. Since all cells in the body are made
up of molecules that found their place because DNA directed them there, it
could be said that physiology is nothing but intelligence at work, and that
every process under way in every cell is essentially intelligenc e talking to
itself. A polyg raph expert named Cleve Backster has performed hundreds of
astonishing experiments that verify this theory . The basis of the polygraph,
or lie detector , is that it measures small changes in the skin’ s galvanic
response—its ability to condu ct electricity—which provides an indirect
measure of whether a person’ s body is tense (associated with lying) or
relaxed (associated with telling the truth).However , the same differences in electrical charge occur when threat or
arousal is present. The polygraph will jump if a person looks at an erotic
picture or relives a past trauma. Amazingly , Backster found that even cells
removed from the body and placed in another room react to these stimuli
when the person does. If a few cells scraped from the inside of someone’ s
mouth are connected to a polyg raph in one room while he sits in another ,
their electrical dischar ge will remain even and flat while he is sitting still
and spike wildly when he looks  at erotic pictures; at the moment when he
stops looking, his polygraph calms down again and so does the polygraph
of his cells in the other room. This uncanny result does not appear to be affected by distanc e. In one
experiment, Backster asked a World War II Navy veteran to watch films of
the battles in the Pacific. As soon as the man saw footage of a fighter going
down in flames,  his polygraph displayed heightened galvanic response. At
the same moment, viewed through simultaneous video pickup, there was
sudden activity on a polygraph  connected to his mouth cells seven miles
away . Significantly , this man had been in battle himself and had witnessed
planes being downed by enemy-aircraft gunnery . His memory of threat was
triggered, and every cell of his body knew it. Being abstract and invisible, intelligence has to react before it can make
itself known. Your brain makes its intelligence known by producing words
and concepts; your body makes its intelligence known by producing
molecules that can carry messages. It is fascinating to observe  how these
two types of intelligence meld into each other . The whole operation takes
place at the quantum level, where the line between the abstract and the
concrete blurs. At the source of intelligence there is very little difference
between thoughts and molecules, as a simple example will demonstrate. The Body as Information
If you bite into a lemon, the juice instantly makes your mouth water as
salivary glands under your tongue start secreting two digestive enzymes
called salivary amylase and maltase. These enzymes begin digesting thefruit sugar found in the lemon juice before passing it along to the more
complex gastric  juices in the stomach. There is little mystery involved; the
presence of food in our mouths automatically triggers digestion. But what happe ns if you mere ly visualize a lemon or think the word
lemon  three times to yourself? Agai n your mouth waters and the same
salivary enzymes are produced, even though there is nothing to digest. The
message sent from the brain is more important than the presence of actual
food. Words and images function just as well as “real” molecules to trigger
the ongoing process of life. We can diagram the process as a circle that constantly renews itself:
A message is not a thing, yet your body turns it into a thing. This is how
nature operates behind the illusi on of physical reality . Our mate rialistic bias
forces us to keep looking at molecules as the source of life (disre garding the
obvious fact that a newly deceased body contains precisely the same
molecules as it did before it died, including a full complement of DNA). W e
assume that lemon juice is the real thing, while the word lemon  is a fake. Saliva does not digest words,  after all. But we in fact are digesting
messages all the time. The molecules of lemon juice trigger salivation by
fitting into receptors on the taste buds, which send a message to the brain,
activating return messages to the salivary glands. Nothing in nature is more miraculous than this transformation. Turning
lead into gold is trivial by comparison, for lead and gold are just minor
reshuf flings of a few protons, neutrons, and electrons. If you hear the words
I love you and your heart starts to pound, a much more astonishing
metamorphosis has taken place. An emotion in another person’ s mind hasbeen transformed into molecules of adrenaline rushing through your
bloodstream. These, in turn, activate receptors situate d on the outside of
your heart cells, which in turn tell each cell that the appropriate  response to
love is to twitch faster than normal. More important, the body feels
transformed—knowing that you are loved, you feel a sense of lightness and
joy, the world appears more vivid, and everyday problems seem to vanish. Why are these appropriate responses? How did the body ever learn that
the word love,  and not glove  or above,  is the trigger for bounding joy in the
heart? This mystery defies the most complex knowledge of biology ,
medicine, psychology , chemistry , and physics, yet it is vitally  important. The heart is kept physically intact by a stream of messages from the genes,
and these in turn are formed from subatomic messages, weavin g in and out
of the quantum dance. By implication, the language  we use to refer to ourselves is of
tremendous importance. Child psychologists have found that young
children are much more deeply influenced by ascriptive statements from
their parents (e.g., “You’re a bad boy”; “You’re a liar”; “You’re not as smart
as your sister”) than by prescriptive statements (e.g., “Always wash your
hands before eating”; “Don’ t put your toys in your mouth”; “Be on time for
school”). In other words, telling a child what he is makes a much deeper
impression than telling him what to do. The mind-body system actually
organizes itself around such verbal experiences, and the wounds delivered
in words can create far more permanent effects than physical trauma, for we
literally create ourselves out of words. This is particula rly important when we look at those two potent words
young  and old. There is an enormous differen ce between saying “I’m too
tired to do that” and “I’m too old to do that.” The first statement delivers a
subliminal message that things will improve; if you are too tired now, your
energy will come back and you won’ t be too tired later. Being too old
sounds much more final, because in our culture, old is defined by the
passage of linear time; old things don’ t become young again. Words have the power to program awareness; it is therefore important to
avoid passively accepting the negative connotations that the word old
carries. Because they expect to accumulate more problems and grievances
in old age, many people glorify youth, not for its specialne ss but because itcame befor e all the tr ouble began. In Age W ave, an insightful book on aging
in America, Ken Dychtwald cites a birthday card that reads:
(FRONT ) Don’ t feel old. W e have a friend your age…
(INSIDE )…and on good days he can still feed himself. This type of black humor makes people laugh by exposing just a bit of
the anxiety that could be overwhelming if confronted in full. But whether
funny or just morbid, the joke implies a complaint that anoth er birthday
card states baldly: “You have just turned 30. You will never have fun again
for the rest of your life.” What this message says directly is that aging is
deeply resented;  what is left unsaid is that there is nothing we can do about
it. The sad fact is that our societ y, lacking good models of aging, has loaded
the very word with layers of prejudice. Dychtwald spells out the implications of putting old and young at
opposite poles:
•  If young is good, old must be bad. •  If the young have it all, then the old must be losing it. •  If young is creative and dynamic, old must be dull and staid. •  If young is beautiful, old must be unattractive. •  If it’ s exciting to be young, it must be boring to be old. •  If the young are full of passion, the old must be beyond caring. •  If children are our tomorrow , then old people must be our yesterday . The typical American way of handling this polarity is to fixate  on being
young forever . Young, beautiful bodies fill the pages of magazines and
television screens. To judge by mass advertising, America is a paradise
inhabited by people under 30 with perpetually tanned skin, sleek muscles,
and ecstatic smiles. But the image of America as the land of eternal youth is
grossly at odds with reality: as of July 1983, there were more people over
65 in this coun try than there were teenagers, meaning that we officially
ceased to be young a decade ago. This fact is difficult to reconcile  with a value system in which the words
young  and old are polarized, and the positive pole is youth. Elevating youth
as the ideal of life is one side of the coin; the other is the denial that old age
exists. On televi sion only 3 percent of the characters are over 65, comparedto 16 percent in the general population. Old people are rarely used as
models in advertising. In social situations, asking people their age is
considered rude, and if people answer , many will subtract a few years
(unlike in China and other coun tries where old age is valued—t here, people
will tend to add a few years). Dychtwald points out that while people over age 65 now enter into
maturity healthier than ever, “the image of youth as vigorous and powerful
and sexy still has as its shadow an image of older people as incompetent,
inflexible, wedd ed to the past, desexed, uncreative, poor, sick, and slow.”
For someone who accepts that these degrading terms apply to old age, their
ascriptive power is just as strong as the ones from childhood that make us
feel guilty , ashamed, and unworthy for years afterward. Words are more
than symbols; they are triggers of biological information. If we look at it
closely , the word young  is a code for many things that actually have nothing
to do with youth. The highes t rates of crime, drug abuse, alcoholism,
suicide, schizophrenia, and social unrest occur among the young. Nevertheless, youth is a symbolic ideal that almost everyone responds to
positively . If we wanted to, we could transf er the same positive value to age. An Old
Testament verse dating back to the reign of Solomon declares:
Gladness of heart is life to a man,
joy is what gives him length of days. The belief that long life represents maximum joy is echoed in other
cultures, particularly in those where reaching great age is esteemed and
every added year holds more value. Hokusai, the great Japanese woodblock
artist, began life as a prodigy—h e could draw proficiently from the age of 6
—but he tells us that he was not satisfied with his skill until he turned 70. Looking further ahead, he predicted that “at 80 I shall have considerable
talent, at 100 I shall be sublime, and at no I shall render life to a single line,
a single point.” Hokusai did not live to be 110—he died in 1849 as he was
turning 90—but  however old he was, he believed that the best was yet to
come.In our society , the word old implies increasing disorder and frailty , but in
truth disorder , being the result of imbalance, can occur at any age: A 70-
year-old jogger is likely to have an immune system superior to that of a
sedentary 45-ye ar-old. Despite our fears that the aging brain must fall prey
to senility , the vast majority of old people retain their faculties intact, and
many creative abilities ripen toward the very end of life. In 1992, a
marvelous 99-year -old pianist, Mieczyslaw Horszowski, announced his
100th birthday concert in Carnegie Hall, following a long tradition of
masterful musicians who performed into their eighties and nineties,
including Toscanini, Horowitz, Rubinstein, and Serkin. Although we
identify creative  genius with child prodigies such as Mozart, researchers in
creativity point out that the careers that last longest are often those that
began late. If we look beyond the false duality of “old” and “young,” what we find is
a different reality: The body is a network of messages constantly being
transmitted and received. Some  of these messages nourish and sustain us,
while others lead to disorder and breakdown. Life-nourishing experiences
go far beyond cell biology . The tenderness of a mother watching her toddler
walk for the first time feeds the baby’ s body (witness how a baby
languishes when  motherly love is withdrawn, even for a day). To a growing
child, the sensit ive encouragem ent of a teacher is as important as a hot
lunch. What makes for a straighter spine, vitamin-D milk or self-esteem? Once we reach adulthood, gaining the wholehearted respec t of co-
workers wards off heart disease as effectively (and much more naturally) as
counting milligr ams of cholesterol. Respect makes the heart feel trusting
and confident, two ingredients that belong inside any healthy body . The
decisions we make in terms of our basic happiness and fulfillment are
therefore exactly the ones that determine how we age. It has dawned  on medicine that nurturing is immensely valuable
physiologically . If newborns are touched and caressed, their levels of
growth hormone  increase, and the protective coating of the motor nerves,
myelin, become s thicker . A mother ’s loving urge to cuddle her baby
translates directly into life-sustaining biochemical reactions. Babies
deprived of loving attention can become emotionally stunted or
dysfunctional. In experiments with rhesus monkeys, newborns were takenaway from their mothers and provided with a choice of two artificial
substitutes—either a cold, wire- mesh model with a bottle stickin g out of its
middle or a plush, warm, terrycloth model that was not affixed with a bottle
and had no milk to offer. In every case, the baby monkeys chose to cling to
the warm, soft “mother” even though it did not give food. The instinct for
emotional nourishment proved more powerful than did that for physical
nourishment. The Music of the Body
How can a person sustain a nurturing life? This is a broad, daunting
question, given the harsh conditions of our environment. No two people
lead identical lives or contain the same information inside their mind-body
systems. Nevertheless, there are some basic rules governing everyone’ s
inner intelligence:
  1. Intelligence is meant to flow . 2. Every impulse of intelligence has a physical correlate. 3. The body keeps in balance through complex rhythms and cycles
—these biorhythms are our connecting link to the larger rhythms
of Nature. 4. When the body is in balance, it sends out signals of comfort;
when it is out of balance, it sends out signals of discomfort. Comfort indicates that a person is in harmonious relationship to
his environment; discomfort indicates that some kind of
disharmony has arisen. 5. Living in harmony with the body’ s rhythms overcomes entropy
by allowing a frictionless flow of biological information. Living
in opposition to the body’ s rhythms produces an increase in
entropy , leading to disorder . If my intention is to live in harmony with my environment, my single
best indicator of success is my body’ s feelings of comfort. We go through
so many experiences in life that it is difficult to be aware of the actual basisfor comfort; many psychologic al and physical factors are blended into
every moment of existence. But Nature has programmed us biologically
with rhythms and cycles that remain strikingly similar for most people. A
new science called chronobiolo gy (the biology of time) has studied the
effects of these cycles on everyday life. Founded and named by Dr. Franz
Halber g, professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota,
chronobiology asserts that our bodies have an internal music that we can—
and should—tune in to. In order for you to move your eye from my last word to this one, for
example, a dozen activities have to mesh with total precision. Each retinal
cell and brain neuron pulsates hundreds of times per second with electrical
charges created by the pumping of potassium and sodium ions across the
cell membrane; the synapses, or gaps, between neurons fire bursts of
neurotransmitters to send signal s down the optic nerve and throughout the
visual cortex; the minute muscles that move the eye twitch continually like
an idling engine throbbing with chemical dischar ges; all of this cellular
pulsation in turn depends on incredibly rapid vibrations of atomic “clocks”
at the quantum level. Biorhythms have many medical implications: Everyone’ s body
temperature has a daily cycle, and hormones move in complexly interwoven
cycles, with daily rhythms enme shed in larger monthly and seasonal cycles. (Growth hormone, for example,  changes daily , while a woman’ s menstrual
cycle reflects monthly hormonal rhythms.) Rheumatoid arthritis hurts most
in the morning, when the body’ s natural inflammatory agents appear to be
low; this is the best time to take aspirin or other painkilling drugs. Blood
pressure and adrenaline peak in the morning, which may explain why so
many heart attacks and strokes occur at 9:00 A.M. In asthmatics, bronchial
tubes are more constricted in late evening than in morning. By studying
patients’ individual cycles, we may be able to prevent disease. Some babies
may show blood pressure cycles  that predict hypertension in adulthood, for
example, and heat fluctuations in the breast may predict tumors. Dr. Halber g has made fascina ting findings about how the timing of
surgery and chemotherapy can significantly alter a patient’ s outcome. For
instance, women  who underwent breast cancer surgery in the week before
and around the time of their period were four times more likely  to suffer arecurrence of their disease and to die within ten years than were women
who had surgery between day 7 and day 20 of their monthly cycle (this
finding is according to a preliminary study at New York’s Albany Medical
Center). The reason may be that the hormones released around a woman’ s
menstrual period suppress the immune system. At mid-cycle, however ,
scavenging immune cells may be present in force and destroy stray
malignant cells that were missed by sur gery. Timing chemotherapy to match the body’ s biorhythms has also helped
patients with bladder , colo-rectal, pancreatic, and ovarian cancer , according
to researchers at the University of T exas at Houston. Since cancer cells have
different activity patterns from normal cells, it is best to give drugs when
the cancer cells are active and the normal cells inactive; thus, lower doses
can be given and toxicity reduced. After extensive testing of many critical functions at various times of day,
chronobiologists have derived a timetable for peak ef ficiency:
Morning Alertness gets increasingly sharp
Short-term memory is at its best
Sensitivity to aller gens dips
Sex hormones peak
Noon Body temperature peaks, heightening vigilance
and alertness
Mood is at its best
Sight is sharpest
Afternoon Manual dexterity peaks
Flexibility is at its height
Long-term memory is at its best
Late
afternoon/early
eveningBest time for easy repetitive tasks
 
Best time for physical workout
Taste and smell are at their sharpest
Worst time for aller giesEvening Worst time to eat lar ge meal if you want to lose
weight; metabolism at its lowest
Midnight to dawn Alertness at worst between 3:00 and 6:00 A.M. Most accident-prone period
Most common time to give birth
Whether it is advisable to try to live according to these precise times is
debatable. The fact that the body , if left to itself, naturally wakes and sleeps
on a twenty-fiv e-hour cycle (known as the circadian rhythm) does not
prevent us from waking and sleeping on a twenty-four -hour cycle without
harm. On the other hand, studies of night-shift workers have demonstrated
that their bodies never completely adjust to the reversal of the wake-sleep
cycle. Night workers suffer a higher incidence of colds and depression than
day workers and tend to have chronically weakened immune systems. What is fundam entally importan t about biorhythms, I believe, is that they
provide the basis for the state of dynamic non-change. I used this phrase to
describe the balance of opposites that must be maintained in order for the
body to resist disorder . It is necessary that we think, feel, and move in
balanced cycles. If you decided to run in a marathon and your body insisted
on keep ing to its “normal” levels of functioning, you would quickly
collapse. A faster heartbeat, higher body temperature, and elevated blood
pressure have to kick in for you to be able to run. Medically speaking, a
runner has gone into mild fever, tachycardia, and hypertension, but these
are perfe ctly normal under running conditions, assuming that they are kept
within a healthy range and return to their balance point when the runner
comes to rest again. We are awash in a tide of balance and imbalance surging back and forth. Dozens of bodily functions are disturbed every second, meaning that any
fixed definition of health becomes meaningless—one might as easily try to
define a symphony by stopping the orchestra on one chord. Food, water ,
and air flow through us in rhythmic patterns determined by dozens of
variables, and residues of exper ience are built up like shifting sand dunes. Structure and motion, the fixed  and the changing, both count. Your doctor
may tell you that you have a resting pulse of 80, blood pressure  of 120/70,
and body temperature of 98.6 degrees F., all of which are considerednormal. Yet this assessment is purely for convenience. Such measurements
are good  only for the moment they are taken, for each dance s around its
balance point, creating the music of the living body . When the Music Dies
Aging is marked by a loss of many of the body’ s key balance points. Elderly people often find that their body temperature recovers more slowly
from extremes of heat and cold;  their sense of balance is impaired, making
walking difficult; blood sugar , hormone levels, and metabo lic rate are
thrown of f. To understand why this happens, we can turn to one of the worst
imbalances of aging, high blood pressure. Left untreated, high blood
pressure cuts life short by an average of twenty years, making it far more
lethal than any single disease. Hypertension is not a disease but a skewed
cycle in the body’ s natural rhythms. Blood pressure is controlled by the
brain, which sets up a cycle that rises and falls throughout the day,
responding to all sorts of inner and outer cues. Taking a blood pressure
reading is therefore like taking one snapshot of a roller coaster—you need
at least three widely separated readings to glimpse the peaks and valleys of
your blood pressure cycle, which sometimes takes several days to complete. Blood pressure rises and falls in everyone, but for some peopl e the fall
will not return to its former level; elevated pressure begins to creep in, and,
over time, the cyclic swing will become skewed toward hypertension. This
tendency is so common as people age that it follows a predicta ble general
pattern. Here is the chart for males between the ages of 20 and 70:
AVERAGE MALE BLOOD PRESSURE
Age 20 122/76
Age 30 125/76
Age 40 129/81Age 50 134/83
Age 60 140/83
Age 70 148/81
The chart shows  a steady increa se in both the lower (diastolic) and upper
(systolic) readings, but at different rates, with the diastolic or resting blood
pressure movin g half as fast. (The same tendency holds for women,
although the rise in pressure is generally slower .) This rise is not normal; to
remain healthy , the body needs to maintain readings in the range of 120/80,
although higher levels may be acceptable for a while. Since clinical hypertension is usually defined as readings higher than
140/90, the average male seems safe until after age 70, but in reality 60
million Americans (approximately one-third of all adults) have already
crossed the threshold into hypertension. Even a small encroachment can be
dangerous. Half the deaths associated with high blood pressure occur
among “borderline” patients whose pressures are in the range of 130/90. Many males in their thirties are already in this range. Compared to a healthy
person, someone with hypertension is at twice the risk for dying in the next
year, three times the risk for dying of a heart attack, four times the risk for
having heart failure, and seven times the risk for having a stroke. The price
of losing one’ s internal balance is very high. The list of influences that can raise blood pressure is long and wide-
ranging. If you work the body hard, blood pressure rises. Emotional stress
and anxiety can cause the same result. Even without any outside influence,
time of day has an effect (one of the complications that can make it difficult
to diagn ose hypertension is that some people experience their peak readings
at night). But 90 percent of high-blood-pressure patients are classified as
“essential” hype rtensives, mean ing that there is no identifiabl e cause for
their condition. Researchers have put portable monitors on secretaries, nurses, and Wall
Street brokers who have normal blood pressure. The monitor is able to send
electronically a continuous reading of how the events of a typic al day alter
normal blood pressure. These researchers found that “normal” is a fiction in
terms of any fixed number; when the secretary was yelled at, or the nurse
attended to an emer gency gunshot wound, or the stockbroker traded in thebidding frenzy of a sliding market, blood pressure skyrocketed. How much
elevation occur red depended on the person and the stress; people also
varied in terms of how long the elevation lasted. The nurse might still have
high blood pressure six hours after the emer gency , when she was at home
apparently relax ing over a quiet  dinner . As far as her body was concerned,
the memory of stress was just as real as the stress itself. This gives us a valuable clue—the body’ s memory of stress causes
normal cycles to be thrown out of balance. Instead of returning to their
original position , they drift slightly. Over time, the net result is a state of
dynamic imbalance. The back-and-forth dance continues but slightly out of
line. As applied to aging, this can be portrayed with a simple diagram:
Each dot represents one of the many balance points for blood pressure,
body temperature, endocrine levels, etc., that the body’ s intelligence keeps
in balance. Under stress, all shift together , only to regain their original
position when the body returns to its resting State. Let’s say that the above
is you at age 20. When you are 60, the picture will be skewed toward stress
even while you aren’ t under stress:
The difference between the resting state and stress is now much greater , and
when the stress is over, the body still feels the effect. The balance points
have shifted as a result of remembering too much of the stress. (In physical
terms, stress hormones have damaged various tissues; in subjective terms,
the person feels less energy, and a vague sense of impairment beginsgradually to increase over time.) The skewed dots on the right remind me of
how old people walk bent over, their pitched-forward posture denoting the
imbalances that are ravaging their physiology . Finally , balance collapses at
the point of death. The scattered dots represent balance points that stray from orderliness,
meaning that the body’ s intelligence no longer controls them sufficiently , if
at all. Near death, the body is so close to total imbalance that adding extra
stress, in the form of disease, emotional shock, or simple daily  challenges,
places too great  a strain on the weakened information network that is the
blueprint of life. The balance points start to unravel in some critical area—
heartbeat flutters erratica lly, the immune system collapses, an ulcer
perforates. The state of dynam ic non-change loses its coherence, and in
death, balance points scatter into disorder . Entropy has triumphed. The best defense against this catastrophe is to preserve and renew the
body’ s instinct for balance. The fact that blood pressure is controlled by the
autonomic (involuntary) nervous system once convinced doctor s that it was
beyond conscious control. However , three decades of research with
biofeedback, meditation, hypnosis, and other mind-body techn iques have
shown that the mind is capable of taking control of involuntary functions. The deeper question has been whether controlling one stray rhythm such as
blood pressure meant that a much broader effect such as aging could also be
controlled. You cannot hook someone up to a biofeedback machine that
beeps whenever  he is getting older . Fortunately , there is a very broad-based
cycle in the body that directly reflects the aging process, the cycle of
hormones. These messenger molecules carry an enormous amount of the
information circulating inside us. If hormonal balance can be preserved, we
will have a reliable indicator that the flow of intelligence is also balanced. It
is likely that many of the most important age changes are mediated byhormones triggered by stress and can be prevented by controlling stress. This is the possibility we will investigate next. OceanofPDF .comTHE INVISIBLE THREAT:
Aging, Stress, and Body Rhythms
For more than fifty years physiologists have known that putting stress on an
animal causes it to age very quickly . When you place a mouse on an electric
grid and admini ster shocks to it, you need not raise the shock s to a lethal
level to kill the mouse. Simply by giving very mild shocks at random
intervals, you will arouse the mouse’ s stress response. Each time this
happens, its body breaks down a little bit. After a few days of such stress,
the mouse will die, and on autopsy its tissues will display many signs of
accelerated aging. Since the shocks themselves were mild, the cause of
death was not the external stress but the mouse’ s reaction—its body killed
itself. Similarly , humans can withstand extraordinary stresses from the
environment, but if we are push ed too far, our stress response turns on our
own bodies and begins to create  breakdowns both mentally and physically . In war, which is a state of extremely heightened, continual stress, every
front-line soldie r will eventually go into shell shock or battle fatigue if kept
under fire too long; both syndromes are signs from the body that it is
exceeding its own coping mechanisms. The human brain retains a primitive memory that is programme d to cope
with every stress in basically the same way as our ancestors coped with
saber -toothed tigers. If someone points a gun at you and threate ns to shoot,
you instantly make a dramatic shift into a state of heightened arousal. A
full-blown fight-or -flight response explodes throughout your body ,
preparing you for action. A message of alarm from the brain releases a
flood of adrenaline from the adrenal cortex, which races through the
bloodstream and completely overturns the usual business of the body .Most of the time, your cells are occupied with renewal—roughly 90
percent of a cell’s energy normally goes to building new proteins and
manufacturing new DNA and RNA. When the brain perce ives threat,
however , the process of building is set aside. Whatever you decide to do in
fight-or -flight situations, your body needs a massive burst of energy to
propel your muscles. To allow this, the normal style of metabolism that
builds the body , called anabolic metabolism, converts to its opposite,
catabolic metabolism, which breaks down tissues. Adrenaline launches a cascade of responses—blood pressure rises,
muscles tense, breathing becomes shallow and rapid, sexual  desire and
hunger are suppressed, digestion stops, the brain becomes hyperalert and
the senses uncannily clear (in times of intense fear, such as in battle,
soldiers hear themselves breathing as loud as bellows, and the eyes of an
approaching enemy loom as large as saucers). As a temporary expedient,
the stress response is vital, but if it is not terminated in time, the effects of
catabolic metabolism are disastr ous. Every aspect of stress arousal leads to
its own specific disorder under prolonged situations:
What is so striking about the accumulated consequences of stress is that
taken all together they look very much like growing old. Hypertension,
ulcers, impotence, wasted muscles, and diabetes are commo n signs of
aging. The elderly have lower disease resistance, and senility seems directly
connected to lost or damaged neurons in the brain. On the surface these
appear to be unrelated symptoms, but they become unified as extreme
results of the stress response. Stress researchers have shown that arousal
occurs only at the onset of stress. If the exposure to threat is not removed,
arousal turns to exhaustion, because the body finds itself unable  to return to
the normal anabolic metabolism that builds reserves of tissue and energy. Old people, then, appear like shell-shock victims, exhausted by overlong
exposure to the struggle of life. A steady  decline in the stress response is universal as aging proceeds. Older people take longer to recover from stress, and they become less
tolerant of strong stresses (for example, it is extremely rare for a young
person to die of grief, an event  that becomes more likely with age). This
decline is more than a straight-line drop. It doubles exponentially , meaning
that one year of old age produces as much deterioration in the stressresponse as two years of middle  age. For very old people, it may take only
six months; eventually , the instinct to come back into balance breaks down
completely , and even mild stresses—a bout of flu, a minor fall, losing a
small amount of money—become extremely dif ficult to cope with. Whenever stress  is blamed for an ailment, people jump to the conclusion
that the problem is too much stress, but in fact the fault lies with the body’ s
coping mechanism. The mice who die from too many shocks  serve as a
good example— if their bodies were given time to recover betw een shocks,
the anim als wouldn’t be harmed. But the frequency of the shocks overtaxes
the physiology , eventually exhausting its ability to spring back to normal. When Hans Selye introduced the concept of stress in the 1930s, he
assumed that a powerful outside stressor , such as physical injury , starvation,
exposure to heat or cold, or sleep deprivation, would call forth much the
same stress response every time. But the truth appears to be more complex. The theory of stress must be modified to include the mind-body connection,
for such invisible elements as interpretation, belief, and attitude are
enormously important in the actual workings of the stress response. In many ways stress research has not recovered from this shocking
finding. How can a mirage of food substitute for the real thing? The only
viable answer , I think, is that the monkey felt nourished from within, and its
perception of satisfaction was accepted as food by its body . The theory of
stress has to be modified to include the mind-body connection, for such
invisible elemen ts as interpretation, belief, and attitude count enormously in
the actual workings of the stress response. Stages of Stress
Whenever you experience a stress, there are three phases to your response:
(1) the stressful event; (2) your inner appraisal of it; (3) your body’ s
reaction. What makes the stress response so dif ficult to handle is that once it
begins, the mind has no control over it. In totally inappropriate situations,
such as sitting in a traffic jam or being criticized at work , the stressresponse can be triggered with no hope that its intended purpose—fighting
or running away—can be carried out. Modern life is full of external stressors that cannot be avoided. A city is
essentially a monolithic stress machine, cranking out noise and air
pollution, along with excessive speed, overcrowding, crime, and rudeness. In relati on to just one ever-prevalent stress, noise pollution, studies have
suggested many  damaging effects: The incidence of mental disorders rises
under the flight paths near airports; children who live near the Los Angeles
airport have higher than average blood pressure; sleep disturbances
continue in the vicinity of uncontrollable noise long after a person thinks he
has adapted to it; outbreaks of violence and a breakdown of courteous
behavior occur more frequently in noisy work environments. A noise
doesn’ t have to be loud to be damaging. The stressful effects come about if
any irritating noise is repeated over and over , out of your control. This places the burden of dealing with stress on phase 2, appraisal. Although you may not be able to control the stressful event or your body’ s
reaction to it, your appraisal, the vital link that bridges the event and the
reaction, is up to you. Any situation that appears the same on the outside
can turn into a powerful stress  once the interpretation of it changes. A
policeman appea ring at the scene of a crime evokes tremendou s fear in the
criminal but great relief in the victim. A diagnosis of cancer sends the
patient into wild stress but not the doctor . The totally personal way in which we filter all events determines how
stressful they are. External stressors are basically triggers. If you don’t feel
triggered, there is no stress. A prevailing myth has arisen that some people
thrive on stress. They perform best under high-pressure deadlines and
blossom in the heat of compet ition. What’ s really happening is that they
aren’ t being triggered physiolo gically . Nobody can thrive when the body
keeps secreting cortisol and adrenaline; as we saw, these hormones function
to break down tissue, and extended release of them leads to disease. Management of stress therefore  turns out to be much more complicated
than is general ly supposed, because a person’ s interpretat ion of any
situation is basically projected  from his memory—our reactions to new
situations are always colored by our experiences in the past. Instead of
appraising each new situation afresh, we slip it into old categories; thishappens instantaneously and is beyond our conscious control. If you hate
raw oysters, just the sight of them can make you gag. If you feel outraged
by an acrimonious divorce, your rage will reemer ge when you run into your
former spouse on the street. Neutralizing these old impressions is essential,
for otherwise you have no control over stress—the stressful  event will
trigger your response automatically , making you its prisoner . This unfortunate state has been extensively researched as that of
“hopelessness/helplessness.” Since growing old brings deep feelings of both
kinds, this research has been extremely valuable. A classic experiment in
physiology is to yoke two mice together so that only one is free to eat,
sleep, walk around, and engage in activity , while the other is passively
dragged along. In short order the two will look remarkably different; the
animal who has freedom of choice will continue to be robust and healthy ,
while the one who suffers loss of autonomy will be apathet ic, disease-
prone, and old before its time. The dragged-alo ng mouse has suffered no physical abuse, but losing its
freedom of choice is stressfu l enough to trigger massive destructive
reactions in its body . In experiments involving similar techniques,
laboratory animals can be induced to develop practically any disease, or if a
disease has been introduced, such as a chemically generated tumor , it can be
made to advance much faster . When rats are crowded together like tenants
in a tenement project, their immune systems decline and signs of
hypertension, neurosis, apathy , and depression appear . When baby monkeys
are separated from their mothers at birth and deprived of nurturing, they
exhibit disorien tation, hyperac tivity , introversion, and vario us learning
disabilities. Induced stress in general has been found to hasten the spread of
cancer in rats, rabbits, and mice, and to promote heart attacks. The Critical Factor: Interpretation
The effects of stress-producing situations vary enormously among different
individuals. During the early years of the American space progr am, ground
control personne l were astonished to discover that the heart rates of severalastronauts show ed no changes whatsoever as their rockets lifted off. Yet
there are also hundreds of thousands of people who experience panic
attacks whenever they fly in commercial airliners. Clearly , our
interpretation of an event rather than the event itself is the critical
component in our experience of stress. One thing is certain, however . When a human being feels out of control,
when for whatever reason there’ s a perception of stress, the body releases
hormones identi cal to those associated with aging. This is a crucial point. Simply put, in order to ameliorate the process of growing old, we need to
reduce the production of hormones that speed that process. We must
recognize how our need for control gives rise to stress-producing
interpretations of events, and we must instead embrace the wisdom of
uncertainty and spontaneity . In our everyday lives, this wisdom is always
available to us in many forms:
Laughter  has enormous benefits both physically and psychologically . By its
very nature, real laughter is spontaneous and outside our conscious control. Try to remembe r especially humorous moments from differen t periods of
your life. Then, whenever necessary , call upon these memories to counter
the ef fects of stress. Exercise stimulates the production of neurochemicals that create the
experience of a “natural high. ” When done properly , exercise can also
reverse the loss of strength and muscle mass that typically accompanies
aging. Try to exercise at least to the point where tension is relea sed at least
five times a week. If time is short, do some gentle stretching or just walk
briskly around the room. Breathing  loses its rhyth m under stress. Two or three times a day, sit
quietly , close your eyes, and gently place your attention on your breathing. Without forcing, simply allow the natural rhythm to reestablish itself. Music  is a powerful antidote to stress, especially when it can be heard  with
full attention and enjoyment.
_OceanofPDF.com_Ageless_Body_Timeless_Mind_-_Deepak_Chopra.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        Researcher s at Tufts University, where the federal
government sponsors a major center for the study of human aging, have
demonstrated that the major symptoms of biological aging can be improved
through increased activity (the ef fect is boosted with secondary emphasis on
improved diet). Two Tufts scien tists, William Evans and Brian Rosenber g,
have outlined these findings in their book Biomarkers. The title refers to the
ten markers for age that are now considered reversible:
Lean body (muscle) mass
Strength
Basal metabolic rate
Body fat
Aerobic capacity
Blood pressure
Blood-sugar tolerance
Cholesterol/HDL ratio
Bone density
Body temperature regulation
These markers typically grow  worse as people age. There  are many
variations from  individual to individual; yet before the Tufts findings
emer ged, normal aging was defined to include the following:
  1. Muscle mass. The average American loses 6. 6 pounds of muscle
with each decade after young adulthood; the rate of loss increases
after age 45. 2. Strength. Older people are less strong because bundles of
muscles and motor nerves (called “motor units”) have been
deteriorating. Between the ages of 30 and 70, the average person
loses 20 percent of the motor units in the thighs, with simil ar
losses in all the large and small muscle groups elsewhere in the
body. 3. Basal metabolic rate. The body’ s metabolic rate—how many
calories it needs to sustain itself—declines by 2 percent per
decade after age 20. 4. Body fat. Between the ages of 20 and 65, the average person
doubles his or her ratio of fat to muscle. Sedentary lifestyle and
overeating can raise this ratio even more. 5. Aerobic capacity. By age 65, the body’ s ability to use oxygen
efficiently declines by 30 to 40 percent. 6. Blood pressur e. The majority of Americans show a steady
increase of blood pressure with age. 7. Blood-sugar tolerance. The body’ s ability to use glucose in the
bloodstream declines with age, raising the risk for type II
diabetes. 8. Cholester ol/HDL ratio. Total cholester ol tends to rise in both
men and women until around  age 50, and the “good” HDL
cholesterol that protects the body against heart disease loses
ground to the “bad” LDL cholesterol that increases heart-attack
risk. 9. Bone density. Calcium  tends to be lost from  bones with age,
making the skeleton weaker, less dense, and more brittle. This
tendency, if it goes too far, becomes the disease osteoporosis. 10. Body temperatur e regulation. The body’ s ability to maintain a
steady internal temperature of 98. 6 degrees F. declines with age,
making old people more vulnerable to both hot and cold weather. When the Tufts team discovered that all ten biomarkers could be reversed
in older people, they delivered a sweeping endorsement of the benefits of
exercise. Evans and Rosenber g feel that the first two marke rs—muscle
mass and strength—are the most important, because the body’ s tendency to
double its fat and lose half its muscle mass by age 65 or 70 creates many ofthe other problems of metabolism. Traditionally, one of the classic markers
of growing old has been a decline in lean-body mass, a medical term for all
tissues that are not fat—i. e. , bones, muscles, and vital or gans. With each decade of life after young adulthood, the average American
loses 6. 6 pounds of lean-body mass. Many people who become increasingly
overweight after middle age assume that their problem is too much fat. To
the Tufts researchers, the actual problem is a combination of too much fat
and too little lean-body mass, particularly muscles. Fat and musc le tissue do
not share the same metabolism; comparatively, fat is much more inactive. It
serves as an energy-storage tissue, while muscle is an energy-spending
tissue. If you were a member of prehistoric hunter -gatherer society, having a
thick layer of body fat would be useful. Stored energy gives the body a fuel
reserve for times of famine, and its insulating capacity preserves body
warmth in winter. Because it is much less active biological ly, fat suits
modern life poorly, however; it requires many fewer calories than muscle
tissue to maintain itself (this is also true of the other components of lean-
body mass, bones and vital organs, but to a lesser degree). Someone with
more muscle than fat will have a faster metabolic rate and thus can eat
larger meals without gaining weight. Gerontologists have found that muscle is much more responsible for the
body’ s overall vitality than most people, including most doctors, ever
supposed. Based on their research, Evans and Rosenber g hold that muscle
mass, along with strength, is critical—that by building muscles late in life,
old peop le can significantly rejuvenate their whole physiology. Since the
rate at which you lose lean-body mass accelerates after age 45, the Tufts
team concentrates on full-scale exercise programs for the 45 + age groups,
reversing our social programming, which says that vigorous physical
activity belongs to the young. Previously, a decline in muscle  strength was considered inevitable with
increasing age. Bundles of musc les throughout our bodies are connected to
the central nervous system by motor nerves. Together, nerves and muscles
make up “motor units,” and by looking at cross-sections of muscle tissue,
physiologists determined that motor units are lost with age. The Tufts group conclusively proved that this trend can be reversed. Twelve men between the ages of 60 and 72 were put on regular supervised
weight-training sessions three times a week for three months. They were
asked to train at 80 percent of their “repetition maximum,” the heaviest
weight they could lift at one try. At the end of the experiment, the men’ s
strength had increased dramatic ally, the size of their quadriceps had more
than doubled, and their hamstrings had more than tripled. By the end of the
program, these older men could lift heavier boxes than could the 25-year -
olds working in the laboratory. Milder weight-training programs for people
over age 95 proved equally successful. The clear implication is that our notions about “taking it easy” as we age
need to be reexa mined. The same exercise regimen that builds muscles has
a holistic effect, helping to bring the other biomarkers into line. Blood
pressure and blood-sugar tolerance improved, the typical metabolic decline
of old age was reversed, and the body’ s ability to regulate its internal
temperature stabilized. Physical fitness is also intimately linked to one’s
general well-being; although it wasn’ t their primary goal, the Tufts team
was gratified to find that their subjects felt much younger and much better
about themselves than they had in years. How much exercise is needed to attain these benefits. In the laboratory,
the kind of activity varied widely depending on what was being studied: As
little as twenty minutes of walking three times a week improved the
cholesterol/HDL ratio, but to be most effective, exercise has to be tailored
to the individual, taking weight, age, and fitness into account. If we look
back in history, the benefits of lifelong physical activity were evident even
in ancient times. Ancestral humans in hunter -gatherer societies stood tall
and erect. They had excellent bones and muscles, which they preserved at
all ages (the widespread incide nce of arthritis is one glaring exception to
this; osteoporosis, however, was virtually unknown). Everyone remained fit
and physically active througho ut their lives. Compare this with modern
America, where health promoters boost the concept of being “fit for life,”
while statistics reveal that 40 percent of American adults are completely
sedentary (the percentage is much higher for the elderly) and only 20
percent can be considered active in any reasonable sense. The Value of Balance
Before you decide that hard work is the way to prevent aging, consider that
“work” as defined by physics is not synonymous with sweat and strain. Work is needed to create orderliness and oppose the force of entropy. Exercise has a quantum effect, regardless of how much or little you do, by
giving the body a chance to restore subtle patterns of funct ioning. The
quantum nature of exercise has emer ged slowly, through bits and pieces of
research. In the 1960s a Swedish physiologist named Bengt Saltin wanted
to observ e the effects of comple te bed rest on the human body. The standard
advice to seriou sly ill patients had always been to recuperate  in bed, yet
there was some doubt about whether this advice was sound. Saltin asked
five young men, ranging in condition from extremely fit to sedentary, to
remain lying in bed twenty-four hours a day for three weeks. At the end of
that time he was astonished to discover that all his subjects, regardless of
their physical condition previou sly, suffered a decrease in aerobic capacity
that was equal to twenty years of aging. This was a striking finding, but the most fascinating part is that when
each subject was allowed to stand up out of bed for five minutes a day,
almost the entire  loss of function was prevented. They did not have to move
around or in any way use their muscles. The simple exposure to a quantum
force—gravity—allowed their bodies to remain normal. In a later U. S. study, female runners were tested to see if hard physical exercise helped
prevent osteopo rosis. The best protection against the disease, some experts
feel, is not supp lemental calciu m or estrogen replacement but building up
good bone density in younger years. Since bones get stronger as more
weight is brought to bear upon them, long-distance running should increase
bone density in the legs by a considerable amount. The application to aging
goes beyond osteoporosis, which is an extreme form of bone thinning. Short
of acquiring this disorder, old age brings thinner bones in most people, and
among the very elderly, hip fractures strike one out of three women and one
out of six men. At the Tufts aging center, the bone density of a group of young women
runners was compared with that of women who did no regular exercise. Even though they were 20 percent lighter than the nonrunners, the runnersstill had stronge r leg bones. This made sense considering that the runners’
leg bones were doing more work and bearing more weig ht, but the
researchers were  startled to find that the runners’ forearm bones were also
denser, despite the fact that these bones received no extra weight at all. Somehow the whole skeleton shared the message to deposit more calcium
into the bone tissue, thanks to chemical signals (probably in the form of
hormones) that were triggered at the quantum level. The whole body knew
that exercise was being taken. In quantum terms, whatever promotes orderliness is beneficial in
opposing entrop y. The entire physiology is an island of negat ive entropy;
therefore our efforts need to be directed holistically to preserving
orderliness in every aspect. Because the body uses both creation and
destruction to keep its vital processes going, doing constant work is not the
answer. Exercise has to be balanced by rest, because there is extensive
muscle destruction during exerc ise that needs to be restored in periods of
rest. In every area of life the key is balance, a very general term that can be
broken down into four headings:
Moderation means not going to extremes. Regularity means following a
consistent routin e. Rest means rest. Activity means activity. These four
things sound simple, but, being the only species gifted with self-awareness,
only humans have conscious control over them. The cycle of rest and
activity in lower animals is dictated by instinct, which humans are free to
override. If we override it in the wrong direction, then we actually hasten
entropy. This has become appa rent in the worst aspects of modern life,
which paradoxically blends increased creature comfort with mounting
disorder. A striking example of how our bodies reflect the imbalance of our
lifestyle is heart disease, the major affliction of the elderly in our societyand the cause of more deaths than all other diseases combined. In the 1920s,
cardiology emerged as a flourishing specialty in direct response to the
alarming epidem ic of heart attac ks that was mysteriously sweeping through
our society. The epidemic wors ened without check for another fifty years,
and when it finally abated sometime in the late 1960s, there was little
agreement over what had happened. We are still asking ourselves why
Americans, second only to the Finns, suffer more coronaries than any other
people in the world. William Osler, a founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School and the most
famous physician in America at the turn of the century, noted that in ten
years of practice at one hospita l he saw no cases of angin a pecto ris, the
typical chest pain that indicates the presence of heart disease. In seven years
at Johns Hopkins, Osler saw a total of four angina cases. Today, every
cardiologist sees that number in an hour. The incidence of heart attacks
doubled in this country every two decades after 1900. Dr. Paul Dudley
White, the most eminent cardiologist in the generation after Osler ’s,
believed that the epidemic was due primarily to two changes that had taken
place in America during this century—the enormous acceleration in the
pace of everyday life and a “general enrichment of the diet. ”
“Enrichment” basically means more fat. In the 1920s and afterward,
foods such as butter, cream, and beefsteak became available not just to the
wealthy but to everyone. The quickening pace of life was due to the
increasing use of the automobile, which vastly accelerated the time in
which people reached their destinations and thus gave another impetus to
“the disease of being in a hurry. ” Clearly, these two great changes fitted
people’ s desires  for a materially  better life. An Irish immigran t who could
put steak on the table in place  of cabbage and potatoes thought he was
improving his family’ s lot; to replace the horse and buggy with a Model T
was a goal everyone shared. Our increased consumption of red meat and other foods high in saturated
fats, such as milk, cheese, ice cream, and eggs, has been particularly
unbalanced. If you plot the incidence of heart attacks, arteriosclerosis,
breast cancer, and colon cancer in the countries of the world, you will see
that certain countries will tend to fall to the bottom end for nearly every
disease—Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, El Salvador, Sri Lanka—while othersrise to the top— the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany. Now, if you
graph the count ries of the world according to how much milk, red meat,
eggs, and cheese they consume, the same distribution will occur. The
nations with low disease rates turn out to be those where there is very little
consumption of high-fat foods, while the societies with the richest diets
have catastrophic rates of heart attacks, hardening of the arteries, and
cancer. Achieving cardiovascular fitness also became much more difficult in our
leisure society, where pleasures such as radio, television, and movies are
more enticing, at least superficially, than exercise. To begin with, exercise is
artificial. Until the twentieth century, people were intensely active whether
they liked it or not. Before America became a mechanized society, the
concept of exercise for its own sake was all but unknown, since everyday
life contained an enormous amount of physical activity. Advising a farmer ’s
wife to take up aerobics would have been laughable. As late as 1900,
human labor accounted for 80 percent of the total calories expended to
work the land, despite the fact that tractors and combines were already in
widespread use. Today, when nearly all agriculture is mechanized, human
labor accounts for only 1 percent of the total calories expended. To resume
the normal activity the body needs, we all must consciously oppose the
trend toward increased physical leisure. Other, more intangible changes  stand out equally. Before 1920, half of
Americans lived in small towns, chiefly on farms; after that date, the
majority lived in cities. (The migration to urban areas continues, although
there is some indication of a backlash with the movement of middle- to
upper -class families back to rural areas. They are not going back to work
the farm, howev er, but for cleaner air and less noise than they found in the
city. ) People’ s lives are no longe r paced by the rising and setting of the sun. We get up and go to bed when we like; we work in offices, out of contact
with the open air. If we wish, we can work all night. More important, we do
not labor for ourselves but are frequently tied to someone else’s goals. Corporations set timetables and deadlines, assign job tasks and descriptions,
and ef fectively keep decision-making in the hands of the privileged few. The fact that modern life tends to be so unbalanced, in defiance of the
body’ s innate needs, is not lost on the physiology. Your body sendsunmistakable messages whenever its needs aren’ t being met. The stomach
says it’s too full; muscles tremble when pushed beyond their strength. People who pay attention to the instincts of their bodies, who try to flow
with daily activity rather than push and rush, have a better chanc e of setting
a natural rhythm, despite to modern life’ s few physical requirements. The overall benefit of a balan ced lifestyle emer ged in 1965, when a
Southern Califo rnia research team headed by Nadia Belloc and Lester
Breslow, now dean of public health at UCLA, decided to follow the aging
patterns of people in Alameda County. A twenty-three-page lifestyle
questionnaire was handed out to almost seven thousand subjects asking
them in great detail about their health status and lifestyle. After five and a half years, 371 subjects had died. By looking back at the
original response to these questionnaires, researchers discovered that the
most important distinguishing feature of those who survived was not their
income, physic al condition, or genetic inheritance, but a handful of
extremely simple lifestyle habits:
  1. Sleeping seven or eight hours a night
  2. Eating breakfast almost every day
  3. Not eating between meals
  4. Normal weight—i.
The researchers at Tufts University have demonstrated that the major symptoms of biological aging can be improved through increased physical activity and a secondary emphasis on a healthy diet.
What is the primary focus of the Tufts University researchers?
The text does not explicitly state the primary cause of muscle mass and strength loss, but it does mention that this loss is accelerated after age 45.
What is the primary cause of the loss of muscle mass and strength with age?
The text does not explicitly state the key to preserving the balance of the body, but it does mention the importance of maintaining a balanced lifestyle and the role of the mind in controlling the body's physiological processes.
What is the key to preserving the balance of the body?
The study found that certain lifestyle habits, such as regular physical activity, can significantly increase one's life expectancy.
What is the main finding of the study by Nadia Belloc and Lester Breslow?
The text does not explicitly state the primary cause of the loss of bone density with age, but it does mention that it is a natural part of the aging process.
What is the primary cause of the loss of bone density with age?