Your body needs protein for building everything from muscle to bone. Unfortunately, it doesn’t need as much as most of us give it.
“The average American eats twice the protein he needs,” says Art Mollen, D.O., medical director of the Southwest Health Institute in Phoenix and author of The Anti-Aging Diet. An excess of protein can make you feel heavy, sluggish and, over time, physically feeble. Dr. Mollen and others say we’d be better off eating more like the rural Chinese, whose grain-and-vegetable diet is extremely low in animal protein and whose death rate from colon cancer is about 2.5 times lower than ours.
For optimal health, eat 1 gram of protein for every 3 pounds of body weight per day, suggests Dr. Mollen. That’s about 50 grams for a 150-pound man. A small portion of sirloin steak trimmed of fat contains about 35 grams, so limit yourself to one protein-based meal per day. “If you have a hamburger for lunch, that’s fine, but have cereal or fruit for breakfast and pasta for dinner,” says Dr. Mollen.
Nothing on earth is more debilitating than being cut down in the prime of life by a stroke, the destruction of a portion of the brain caused by a blockage of blood flow to the area. Even a mild attack can leave a man temporarily paralyzed, blind or unable to tale. An estimated 300,000 men suffer strokes each year-and 100,000 will die, according to the National Stroke Association, Doctors say many of those tragedies could be prevented.
New studies show that taking regular doses of aspirin, especially if you have a hi8story of heart or circulation problems, offers significant protection from strokes. Aspirin helps keep arteries from clogging up and blocking blood flow to the brain or heart.
It takes only small doses of aspirin to attain these benefits. “We’re talking 30 to 81 milligrams,” says New York physician Isadore Rossman, M.D., Ph.D., author of Looking Forward: The Complete medical Guide to Successful Aging. Your pharmacist may stock 81-milligram doses, but if you can’t find them, breaking a standard 325-milligram tablet into quarters will give you four correct doses, (Check with your doctor before starting an aspirin regimen.) How often you take aspirin is just as important as how much: Preventive effects are greatest when you take one 81-milligram dose every day or every other day.
In addition to protecting your heart, some studies suggest that taking aspirin regularly can reduce risk of colon cancer and cataracts, protect against gallstones and boost three important immune-system chemicals.
Since high blood pressure is a major cause of strokes, you can help protect yourself by getting your blood pressure checked as often as possible. A study found that systolic pressure (the top number) is a more accurate predictor of stroke risk than the diastolic reading (the bottom number).
A regular weight-training plan can make you feel-and look-decades younger. Recent research indicates that building muscle strength provides greater benefits to your health and vitality than was previously thought. Combined with a regimen of aerobic exercise, weight training strengthens your heart, boosts energy levels and protects you from in injuries. It’ll even improve your sex life, says Mark H. Cline, Ph.D., of the Male Health Center in Dallas. “When you’re physically stronger, you’re more robust, you have more energy and you’re more likely to be sexually active.”
Plus, it helps keep you looking great. Weight training shapes and tones muscles better than aerobic conditioning, and it wards off flab. “As a result, the average man who lifts weights will look even better than an endurance athlete when they’re both older,’ says John Holloszy, M.D., a researcher at Washing ton University School of Medicine in St.Louis.
It’s never too late to take up weight training. According to Tufts University researchers, even people in their nineties were able to increase their leg strength by as much as 200 percent by working out on weight-training equipment. It takes only one weight workout per week to maintain strength well into old age once you’ve made your initial gains (which takes about ten weeks of lifting two or three times a week).
Want to stay younger longer? Here’s the Men’s Health Look-Good, Feel-Great, Head-to-Toe, Anti-Aging Plan to tell you how to do in.
Aging has a way of leapfrogging up your list of concerns-form somewhere below “I’d better clean out those rain gutters soon” to Alert! Alert! Top Priority! Code Red!”-in short order. The catalyst might be noticing a wrinkle that wasn’t there the last time you looked, trying on a favorite shirt that’s suddenly become too tight or playing a routine game of tennis and finding yourself creaky and sore afterward. One day you’re thinking of yourself as a young man; the next day you’re not so sure.
Fortunately, doctors and researchers are starting to pay as much attention to the subject of aging as the rest of us are. They’re working to better understand the changes that come as we get older and what can be done about them. One thing is already clear from their studies: Aging is inevitable-there’s no way to stop the clock-but a gradual decline in good health and good looks isn’t.
“Many of the things we blame on aging really have nothing to do with getting older,” says Ben Douglas, Ph.D., professor of anatomy at the University of Mississippi Medical Center and author of AgeLes: Living Younger Longer. He and others believe that we’re genetically programmed to age at a certain rate but that most people are sapped of an extra measure of youth by diseases and a gradual buildup of preventable niggling insults to the body. As a rule, experts say, people could look younger, feel more vital and live much longer than they do.
“People should be concerned about aging from the earliest stages of their lives,” says Huber Warner, Ph.D., of the National Institute on Aging (NIA). “The problems that lead to aging are cumulative, and the sooner you start correcting them, the better off you are in the long run. I’ve lived by that advice myself, and at age 55, my own experience tells me I feel better for it.”
How can we stay young longer? Men’s Health called on a wide-ranging field of experts on aging and the problems that attend it and asked them that question. This is the best of their advice.