Young For Life: The Easy No-Diet, No-Sweat Plan to Look and Feel 10 Years Younger
352
Young For Life: The Easy No-Diet, No-Sweat Plan to Look and Feel 10 Years Younger
352Hardcover
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Overview
Young for Life begins with the premise that our bodies are miraculous machines that have the potential for life-long vitality, sexuality, and youthfulness, and then shows how to reverse the signs aging through three key life-changing practices:
- Whole Food nutrition for vital nutrients that combat genetic aging
- Convenience exercise-6-second techniques of muscle contraction that are the foundation of shaping sexy muscle anytime, anywhere
- Disease-prevention-fighting nutrient deficiency with micronutrient supplements
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609615420 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Harmony/Rodale |
| Publication date: | 04/02/2013 |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.38(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.12(d) |
About the Author
Dr. Donald "Rock" Schnell suffered a diabetes-induced heart attack at 55. Doctors gave him up to 5 years to live. The Young for Life program is an adaptation of the plan that saved his heart and created his rock-hard body.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Public Enemy
Number One: Nutrient Deficiencies
HOW CAN MALNUTRITION RUN RAMPANT IN THE RICHEST NATION ON EARTH?
If you withhold food from someone for several weeks, that person will starve to death. If you give someone just enough nutrition to get by, they won't starve, but some part of them will be dying. In the United States, food is plentiful, but most of it is processed, artificial, and laden with cellular and neurotoxic chemicals, dyes, preservatives, and additives; it is irradiated, fractionated, microwaved, sprayed with pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides; it is stored for long periods or shipped in hot weather; it is contaminated and genetically modified.
Technically, Americans are not starving to death. In fact, we are eating more than enough calories, but we are getting far too few real nutrients. Like a bird attempting to fly with one wing, we're limping along with symptoms that we've been conditioned to expect and accept. If you want more energy but it seems to be slipping away, you're likely deficient in nutrients. The headache or sense of malaise that keeps you from performing at your peak can be traced directly to your diet.
"Paradoxically, Americans are becoming both more obese and more nutrient deficient at the same time. . . . But if all you eat is processed food—and many Americans do—then you will be like the British sailors of the seventeenth century and get scurvy," says Mark Hyman, MD, author of The Blood Sugar Solution.
Full-blown malnutrition is an identifiable disease with many names. Some examples, in addition to scurvy, are beriberi, rickets, pellagra, and kwashiorkor. These are not often diagnosed in our country, although doctors should be testing for them in children and adults because one cause of pellagra, for example, is a diet high in corn and low in protein. Those who rely on corn as a staple and eat great quantities of popcorn, chips, and cereals are predisposed to pellagra.
Nutrient deficiencies are rampant in our country. "The price the cell pays for being short of micronutrients is DNA damage, which leads to cancer in the future and ages you faster," warns Bruce Ames, PhD, of the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Ames is a leading voice in the appeal for better health and the prevention of disease through nutritional strategies. Having studied his work and that of many of his colleagues, we are convinced that our country is faced with its own unique malnutrition epidemic, which we call Nutrient Deficiency Disorder (NDD). In the United States, we have enough food to fill our bellies, but our food is nutrient poor, and it is making us sick.
Dr. Ames believes a nutrient-deficient diet plays a role in just about every disease you can name, especially obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and a vast number of mental disorders. This level of poor nutrition—best described as just getting by—is a point along the way to full-blown malnutrition. You are low on the nutrients that you need for optimal health, so you obviously have no chance of being optimally healthy. You're like a tire with a leak—not yet flat, but bumping along in that direction. You're not at the clinical level of duress, but you have many symptoms that indicate that you're not at your highest level of health, either.
You may be suffering from high blood pressure. You may be tired all the time, catching every cold and flu bug that comes along. You may be overweight, underweight, anxious, feeling out of sorts and off balance, or walking around with infections you can't shake. You may be peering into the mirror at wrinkles and gray hair long before you expected them to appear. You may have aches and pains. You may have lost interest in sex because you don't feel well enough or have the energy to enjoy it. You're not clinically sick yet, but without a doubt, you're moving in that direction.
When you are in this stage of physical and mental duress, most doctors can't make heads or tails of what's causing your ailments. As long as you have some air in the tire, to them, it's too soon to diagnose a real problem. You receive a patch for the leak. It's some drug that hopefully might stop it. Unfortunately, it most often comes with side effects, which will only cause additional leaks.
Most physicians may be unable to address nutrient deficiencies. The courses they study in medical school amount to a pharmaceutical curriculum. They are trained to fix problems with drugs. If you're eating three or more meals a day, the average medical mind isn't trained to consider malnutrition as a cause of your sickness. Even when a doctor checks your blood, he or she compares the results with bare minimum requirements that actually perpetuate your suffering from Nutrient Deficiency Disorder.
The fact is, the health care system isn't allowing NDD to be diagnosed. Judging from the vending machines and snack tables laden with granola bars and other sweet treats in doctor's offices and hospitals, it's obvious that many of the experts in this system have no clue about the nutrient requirements of your body. They're not even clear about the correct choices of food they themselves need to eat to function at symptom-free levels. You know this is true when you're hospitalized and the food service brings you a tray containing soda and cake and your doctor doesn't even protest.
In a society like ours, seemingly so advanced and blessed with food abundance, there are three areas of health care policy to scrutinize to see why NDD is one of our biggest health problems. These are:
1. Artifacts disguised as food
2. Ridiculous Dietary Reference Intakes
3. Censorship and profits
ARE YOU EATING ARTIFACTS?
In 1940, a very small percentage of our purchased food was processed. Today, that figure is over 90 percent. Processed foods are not foods; they are artifacts, consumed in a society that has been conditioned to accept that industry is the modern mom in the kitchen. Over hundreds of millennia, humans subsisted on natural foods. These can be defined as foods that are growing and alive, or were recently alive, in nature, in the rain and under the sun—all plant foods, meat, eggs, and fish. We ate our food within minutes or hours of gathering it, because there was little opportunity for storage. Even when we no longer hunted and gathered, we still planted our foods in the earth or found them in the rivers, pastures, and meadows where we lived. We could see food's authenticity. This "stuff of life" was what we recognized as food through the generations. Until less than a century ago, there was little possibility of the mass manufacturing, packaging, labeling, warehousing, shipping, and advertising that completely drive what we eat today.
Processed food artifacts include all cereals, sodas, snacks, and breads, as well as canned and packaged foods with long lists of incomprehensible ingredients. Any food made of refined grain and sugar is processed. As are butter substitutes, vegetable oils, and shortenings; deep-fried foods of all kinds; sugared or artificially sweetened soft drinks; all the soy and gluten analogues (including textured vegetable proteins); and all low-fat, animal-free, and fat-free dairy products—especially any protein without fat. This last invention—the low-fat or fat-free food—touted as healthy, wasn't readily available to us before the early 1990s. When it arrived, along with a huge push from the medical community, government agencies, and food manufacturers, obesity rose well past the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention goal, of being under 15 percent, to 33.8 percent. Obesity has more than doubled since the 1960s.
Protein without fat is an artifact because it's man-made; it is never found that way in nature. Protein and fat are sister nutrients occurring in whole foods. Protein completely devoid of fat is an industrialized product. Genetically modified foods are the height of processing. In this case, the industrialization starts at the level of the DNA of the seed that sprouts the food. Other artifacts of this manufactured family dining experience include the junk and fast food served up in plastic and polystyrene cups and dishes, with plastic spoons, forks, and knives.
It's now possible to have complete meals of artifacts throughout life. One-third of all calories in the United States are consumed away from home, and they largely come from processed ingredients and are eaten with processed utensils on processed plates. You have no idea what is in your food. And you wonder why your health is plummeting? Most restaurants rely on reheating foods made with the cheapest processed ingredients they can buy. It's all about making food as inexpensive as possible to garner the greatest profits.
The era of artifact eaters is going to astound archaeologists. They will unearth skeletons with missing teeth, malformed arches, distorted spines, bones full of holes, and malformed joints. When they evaluate the waters and streams of this era, they'll wonder at the toxic residues of seemingly tens of thousands of pharmaceutical drugs. They will probably categorize us as Homo persecutis—disenfranchised artifact eaters, victims of profit- driven food industries and the most insane of human missteps: when we left the family kitchen to be convenienced to death and allowed our food to be industrialized.
Is it true that you can get all the nutrients you need to prevent illness and an early death by eating a balanced diet? How is it possible to eat a balanced diet with a food supply dominated by artifacts? The fact is, the idea of "balanced diet" hardly applies for most of our population. For example, those on a vegan diet (who mistakenly believe that they're on the healthiest path) are eating an unbalanced and highly processed animal-free diet.
Some experts, like Dr. Ames, believe there is an urgent need to revise the DRI (Dietary Reference Intake, the daily intake level of nutrients required for healthy individuals, similar to the RDA, Recommended Dietary Allowance) and emphasize vitamin supplementation in far higher doses. In an article in the April 2002 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Dr. Ames and his colleagues reported that "about 50 human genetic diseases due to defective enzymes can be remedied or ameliorated" through high-dose nutrient therapy, and that therapy can at least partially restore defective enzyme activity.
A team of physicians and researchers known as the Independent Vitamin Safety Review Panel made the following recommendation to the US government: "Government-sponsored nutrient recommendations, such as the US RDA, are not keeping pace with recent progress in nutrition research. . . . The public has been asked to consume far too little of many . . . key nutrients. Inadequate intake, and inadequate standards to judge intake, have resulted in widespread nutrient inadequacy, chronic disease, and an undernourished but overweight population. . . . Raising the RDA/DRI will save lives and improve health. . . . Clinical and sub-clinical nutrient deficiencies are among the main causes of our society's greatest healthcare problems. Cancer, cardiovascular disease, mental illness, and other diseases are caused or aggravated by poor nutrient intake. The good news is that scientific evidence shows that adequately high consumption of nutrients helps prevent these diseases."
The panel concluded, "In the past, over-conservative government-sponsored standards have encouraged dietary complacency. People have been led to believe that they can get all the nutrients they need from a 'balanced diet' of processed foods. That is not true. For adequate vitamin and mineral intake, a diet of unprocessed, whole foods, along with the intelligent use of nutritional supplements, is more than just a good idea: it is essential."
NDD AND CENSORSHIP
The US National Library of Medicine is the most prestigious archive of scientific findings in the world. It is politically biased and arbitrarily classifies some medical journals as "good" and others as "blacklisted." How does the archive decide what to accept and what to blacklist? We don't know, but the result is that both you and your doctor are deprived of the ability to access decades of peer-reviewed science that can help move you from nutrient deficient to a state of optimal health.
The "good" journals are easy to access on the Internet through an enormous database called MEDLINE, a free service that is provided by the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health, both supported by your tax dollars. We're not saying this isn't money well spent—unless, that is, you're interested in finding out something about NDD and what doctors have to say about the successful reversal of this underlying cause of disease.
Since the 1920s, leading biochemists have foreseen impending epidemics of disease. The writing was on the laboratory wall. In an effort to prevent the tragedy now bearing down on us, these scientists published remarkable research on nutrients, in the hope that nutrient awareness would filter down to the public. Specifically, Roger Williams, PhD, of the University of Texas, who discovered many of the B-complex vitamins and authored one of the main textbooks on biochemistry used nationwide in medical schools, lamented that medical doctors weren't interested in nutritional therapies. They preferred more heroic measures, such as surgery and drugs. In a personal crusade for prevention, Dr. Williams wrote seven books on nutrition for the mainstream, turning directly to the general population to prevent increasingly widespread suffering. He was not alone. There were dozens of dedicated biochemists also fighting to be heard, but they were muzzled, prevented from a public discussion on proven, inexpensive, and safe nutritional therapies. This idea simply didn't fit the model of the profit-centered pharmaceutical industry. Nonetheless, the dissenters fought on, because they understood that pharmaceuticals were completely foreign to the biochemistry of the human body. On the other hand, the nutrients these biochemists recommended were identical, nontoxic molecules that comprise the very structure of the human body.
Two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, PhD, gave these biochemists and other like-minded medical scientists a field of their own when he coined the term orthomolecular medicine, first discussed in Science magazine in 1968. He began to compile their decades of work in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine. Published since then, with authoritative research on nutritional therapies rather than drugs, this journal is "blacklisted" today because of the bias against nutritional solutions in favor of pharmaceutical solutions. Even Dr. Pauling's own research in that journal cannot be included in MEDLINE! (Of course, the issue is profits. Nutrients cannot be patented.) You have no access to Dr. Pauling's research in MEDLINE, nor do medical doctors who turn to that database as a resource, nor do journalists. Even the research for which Dr. Pauling won his first Nobel Prize is excluded! Other valuable, life-saving research papers written by equally prestigious scientists and physicians are missing from MEDLINE, too. These are scientists who have discovered how we could use nutrition and nutrients to prevent and reverse some of today's killer diseases.
Table of Contents
Foreword Ariel Soffer vii
A Message from Marilyn Diamond ix
A Message from Dr. Rock xvi
Part 1 Two Silent Killers
Chapter 1 Public Enemy Number One: Nutrient Deficiencies 2
Chapter 2 Public Enemy Number Two: Sedentary Death Syndrome 10
Part 2 How to Prevent NDD and SeDS
Chapter 3 Grow Younger 18
Chapter 4 The Surprising Effect of Anabolism on Your Hormones 23
Chapter 5 Isometrics 28
Chapter 6 The Isometrics Workout 35
Chapter 7 The Nutrient Advantage 45
Chapter 8 The Sexy Antioxidant 50
Chapter 9 The Most Essential Nutrient for Youth 58
Chapter 10 The Brain-Boosting B-Complex Vitamins 68
Chapter 11 The Danger of an Iodine Deficiency 84
Chapter 12 Solar Eclipse: Our Vitamin D Deficiency 91
Part 3 The Anabolic Foods
Chapter 13 Saturated Fat: What Are You So Afraid Of? 102
Chapter 14 Protein: The First Food for Anabolism 111
Chapter 15 Surprise! Excessive Carbohydrates Cause NDD 121
Chapter 16 How to Slay the Diabetes Dragon 127
Part 4 The Myths that Kill
Chapter 17 Why Your Fear of Cholesterol Is Dangerous to Your Health 138
Chapter 18 Billions of Dollars Fail to Prove the Cholesterol-Lipid Hypothesis 145
Chapter 19 The Famous Framingham Heart Study 154
Part 5 Outing Sugar
Chapter 20 Sweet Deceit 166
Chapter 21 Glycation Nation 173
Part 6 Foods that Keep you Young for Life
Chapter 22 Eggs: The Gold Standard of Proteins 182
Chapter 23 Dairy Power 186
Chapter 24 Beef and Other Red Meats 190
Part 7 Making Our System Work in Your Life
Chapter 25 A New Way of Eating 202
Chapter 26 Best Kitchen Equipment and Foods to Stock 217
Chapter 27 Healthy Meals from Our Kitchen 228
Chapter 28 Isotonics 279
Chapter 29 The Isotonics Exercise Routine 287
Epilogue 305
Resource Guide 307
Acknowledgments 309
Index 311