How Long Will You Live and How Well?

We will get into some heavier stuff with this one - but it’s designed to be inspiring in the end!!! If this is your first time reading, as you can see, I’ve started up a newsletter just for my patients. If you click on ‘READ ONLINE’ above you can find prior editions by scrolling down. You can unsubscribe also at the bottom of the page - but I hope you’ll stick around. This is provided to you with love and the best intentions for your heath and wellbeing! No AI (artificial intelligence) here by the way. All organic - straight from my heart and head!

Life is terminal condition! We will all, some day, move on to the next life. Time is not really our friend in this sense, but time alone is not all there is to this! Have you heard the expression ‘old before your time.’ This is where the concept of biological vs chronological age comes in. Simply stated, there are things we can do to ourselves along the way that age us prematurely. Our ‘biological’ age is measure of how vital and youthful we are. How functional we are. How well our bodies are keeping up with the passage of time. And of course chronological age is simply how many birthdays we’ve had. We don’t want our biological age to be greater than our chronological age. We want the opposite!!!

While many of the things that occur along the way that determine when our time is up are beyond our control, most of them lie at our fingertips in the form a decisions we make about HOW to live. In this newsletter I’m going to give you and brief review of what the most important lifestyle factors are in this regard. Detailed self-help pointers will come to you weekly in subsequent newsletters. Keep in mind this is coming from nearly 40 years of open-minded effort as a healthcare provider.

I read a fascinating review of some research done about 20 years ago. It essentially showed how folks who spent their entire adult lives happy and in control of their choices, and smoked cigarettes, could actually outlive non-smokers who were depressed, stricken with anxiety, and generally unhappy! We’ve all heard the stories about the folks who live to be 100 while smoking, and drinking, and doing all the stuff we call bad. These are the folks I’m talking about here.

The study showed that of all the things we do or don’t do in life, the one thing that stood out above the rest was a happy and satisfied state of mind - when it comes to having a longer life.

Wow. New meaning to ‘mind over matter?’

When we are happy, joyful, grateful… we have a kind of brain and body chemistry that supports a longer life. This subject is handled beautifully in the book ‘Molecules of Emotion’ by Candice Pert, PhD. Another great work is ‘Biology of Belief’ by Bruce Lipton, PhD. Both worth the read!

SN. This not a green light to start or keep smoking!!! No doubt happy folks who don’t smoke will live even longer that happy smokers.

So how do we stay in that kind of brain chemistry? Easier said than done for most of us given the stresses of life. My job here and now is to first open your eyes to the reality. This is not my field directly, however in subsequent newsletters I will provide suggestions.

While on the subject of the brain and longevity, I’ve pushed this issue up here because it ties-in well. Research has proven that chronic pain (pain that lasts for years) can give rise to mental decline. Your brain runs just about everything you need to stay alive, and anything that negatively impacts it’s function can’t be good for our lifespan. Chronic pain has been liked to the following:

• Grey matter loss (loss of brain size)

• Disrupted brain cell communication

• Changes in brain structure

• Depression/anxiety/irritability

• Cardiovascular (heart) disease

This is an area where I work daily, and goes to the absolute importance of finding a way to eradicate or at least minimize chronic pain. Getting back under chiropractic care can go a long way toward accomplishing this - and there is more at stake here than just pain relief. We are talking about something that may contribute to a longer life. Aside from chiropractic, one of the most powerful ways of getting rid of chronic pain is diet, which we will get to below.

Here we go again? If you have read my previous newsletters you have seen this pop up before. We you are done reading here, you can read my prior newsletter on chronic inflammation (CI) by clicking this link:

Chronic inflammation (CI) is not only the common cause or contributor to almost every disease process you can name, it is also a driver oxidative stress (OS). OS is a chemical process that ages our cells. Our cells according to cellular biologists have the potential to last us 120 years - which means potentially we can live for 120 years! OS is a big part of why most all of us don’t make it that far. CI and the OS are largely a function of eating the wrong foods, but are also contributed to by the #1 issue on this list - EMOTIONAL STRESS. Certain thoughts produce certain chemicals in the body, and the negative emotions give rise to a chemistry that damages our cells.

Diet

The link above I gave you to the newsletter on CI outlines how to eat to avoid CI and OS. I my opinion you need to get yourself on a Paleo type diet - one that cuts out all grain, legumes, dairy, processed foods, nightshade veggies, white potatoes, seed oils, and goes very easy on sugars (including sugars from fruit). Instead we need to eat in a more primal, hunter-gatherer way - meats, fish, eggs, above ground veggies, animal fats, limited fruits. Please do click that link above. In subsequent newsletter we will go into more detail about Paleo and similar eating lifestyles.

Other Causes of OS

• Air pollution

• Over-exposure to the sun

• Heavy metals (mercury in our fish, tooth fillings, other metals in our food and water)

• Pesticides

• Smoking

• Booze

• Lack of exercise

• Drugs (Rx and illegal)

All of the above pretty much speaks for itself.

Choose Your Grandparents Correctly

Obviously, we can’t choose our grandparents (a little attempt at humor). We are very much bound by our genetics, and it can be argued that some of us inherit greater longevity potential than others from our parents, grandparents, etc.

However…

Each of us an strive to live out the longest and healthiest life that our genes will permit. Each of us can strive not to be old before our time. We can work to insure our biological age is kicking our chronological age’s butt!

Could 80 become the new 50?

The science of longevity has revealed that most of us are getting old before our time, especially in consideration of the potential we have in our cells to live 120 years. In up coming newsletters we will look more closely at strategies that may help us all stick around longer, and do so with a high quality of life.

Life may be a terminal condition, but we need not ‘go gently into that good night.’ We can ‘rage, rage… against the drying of the light!’

Thanks for reading along! Feel free to share this newsletter. If you are in need of our help and haven’t seen us for a good while, ask about re-connection specials we may have when you call in!

Blessings,

Dr. Seiler