IN THE KITCHEN

It came to us while the three of us were in the kitchen, preparing a meal together and talking about how these days, as we age, our yoga practices are designed to address our changing needs and concerns: wasn’t it about time the three of us finally collaborated on a project? “Yoga for healthy aging,” Nina said. “And a blog would be a perfect way to start.” Baxter was concerned that we might not have enough material for an ongoing project, but Brad said, “No way. We’ll never run out of topics!”

You see, between the three of us, we have a wealth of special information and techniques we'd love to share with you.

Baxter Bell is an MD, a medical acupuncturist, and a long-time yoga teacher. Besides teaching regular asana classes, he specializes in yoga for back care and anatomy for yogis. He'll be recommending yoga poses and other practices for you that address various physical aspects of healthy aging, including strength, balance, flexibility, circulation and agility.

Brad Gibson is a professor at the Buck Institute for Age Research, where aging and age-related diseases are the sole focus of the institute. As more is discovered about the aging process, our understanding about how to support healthy aging with yoga will increase. Brad will help you keep in touch with the latest scientific discoveries, and we'll explain their connection to specific yoga practices.

Nina Zolotow is a yoga writer as well as a certified yoga teacher and a long-time yoga practitioner, and her special area of expertise is yoga for emotional wellbeing (including yoga for stress, insomnia, depression, and anxiety). She’ll be recommending yoga practices for cultivating equanimity because as we age, reducing stress is more important than ever, both for our physical health and our peace of mind.

This week each of us will take a turn letting you know a little more about ourselves and why we decided to take on this project. After that, we hope to take requests! Below is a list of the general topics we are planning to take on. But please leave a comment if any you have any special questions or concerns you like us to address.

·      strength

·      balance

·      flexibility

·      agility

·      circulation

·      stress

·      cognitive functioning

·      equanimity

·      specific age-related diseases (such as arthritis, high blood pressure, Parkinson’s, diabetes, etc.)

·      what is known (and what is not known) about the aging process

Tune in tomorrow to hear from Baxter. In the meantime, here’s another photo of Mount Tamalpais, where the peak is above the fog line. Sometimes we can get there. 

 

Being glucose intolerant may make you live only to be 96, if you would otherwise live to be 100

This comes also from the widely cited Brunner and colleagues study, published in Diabetes Care in 2006. They defined a person as glucose intolerant if he or she had a blood glucose level of 5.3-11 mmol/l after a 2-h post–50-g oral glucose tolerance test. For those using the other measurement system, like us here in the USA, that is a blood glucose level of approximately 95-198 mg/dl.

Quite a range, eh!? This covers the high end of normoglycemia, as well as pre- to full-blown type 2 diabetes.

In this investigation, called the Whitehall Study, 18,403 nonindustrial London-based male civil servants aged 40 to 64 years were examined between September 1967 and January 1970. These folks were then followed for over 30 years, based on the National Health Service Central Registry; essentially to find out whether they had died, and of what. During this period, there were 11,426 deaths from all causes; with 5,497 due to cardiovascular disease (48.1%) and 3,240 due to cancer (28.4%).

The graph below shows the age-adjusted survival rates against time after diagnosis. Presumably the N values refer to the individuals in the glucose intolerant (GI) and type 2 diabetic (T2DM) groups that were alive at the end of the monitoring period. This does not apply to the normoglycemic N value; this value seems to refer to the number of normoglycemic folks alive after the divergence point (5-10 years from diagnosis).

Note by the authors: “Survival by baseline glucose tolerance status diverged after 5-10 years of follow-up. Median survival differed by 4 years between the normoglycemic and glucose intolerant groups and was 10 years less in the diabetic compared with the glucose intolerant group.”

That is, it took between 5 and 10 years of high blood glucose levels for any effect on mortality to be noticed. One would expect at least some of the diagnosed folks to have done something about their blood glucose levels; a confounder that was not properly controlled for in this study, as far as I can tell. The glucose intolerant folks ended up living 4 years less than the normoglycemics, and 10 years more than the diabetics.

One implication of this article is that perhaps you should not worry too much if you experience a temporary increase in blood glucose levels due to compensatory adaptation to healthy changes in diet and lifestyle, such as elevated growth hormone levels. It seems unlikely that such temporary increase in blood glucose levels, even if lasting as much as 1 year, will lead to permanent damage to cells involved in glucose metabolism like the beta cells in the pancreas.

Another implication is that being diagnosed as pre-diabetic or diabetic is not a death sentence, as some people seem to take such diagnoses at first. Many of the folks in this study who decided to do something about their health following an adverse diagnosis probably followed the traditional advice for the treatment of pre-diabetes and diabetes, which likely made their health worse. (See Jeff O’Connell’s book Sugar Nation for a detailed discussion of what that advice entails.) And still, not everyone progressed from pre-diabetes to full-blow diabetes. Probably fewer refined foods available helped, but this does not fully explain the lack of progression to full-blow diabetes.

It is important to note that this study was conducted in the late 1960s. Biosynthetic insulin was developed in the 1970s using recombinant DNA techniques, and was thus largely unavailable to the participants of this study. Other treatment options were also largely unavailable. Arguably the most influential book on low carbohydrate dieting, by Dr. Atkins, was published in the early 1970s. The targeted use of low carbohydrate dieting for blood glucose control in diabetics was not widely promoted until the 1980s, and even today it is not adopted by mainstream diabetes doctors. To this I should add that, at least anecdotally and from living in an area where diabetes is an epidemic (South Texas), those people who carefully control their blood sugars after type 2 diabetes diagnoses, in many cases with the help of drugs, seem to see marked and sustained health improvements.

Finally, an interesting implication of this study is that glucose intolerance, as defined in the article, would probably not do much to change an outside observer’s perception of a long-living population. That is, if you take a population whose individuals are predisposed to live long lives, with many naturally becoming centenarians, they will likely still be living long lives even if glucose intolerance is rampant. Without carefully conducted glucose tolerance tests, an outside observer may conclude that a damaging diet is actually healthy by still finding many long-living individuals in a population consuming that diet.

Healthy Spirits: New Releases

1. Hanssens Gueuze 750ml

2. Anchorage Brewing "Love Buzz" (saison w/rose hips+brettanomyces aged in pinot noir barrels).

3. Anchorage Brewing Bitter Monk (Belgian DIPA with Apollo, Citra+Simcoe hops, dry hopped with Citra in chardonnay barrels with brettanomyces).

cheers,

dave hauslein
beer manager
415-255-0610

Healthy Spirits: Nectar Ales Black Xantus Batch 2

Now in stock.

Healthy Spirits: New Arrivals

1. Alaskan Barleywine 2010

2. Alaskan Perserverance 25th Anniversary Ale

3. Huisbrouwerij Sint Canarus Tripel

4. Huisbrouwerij Sint Canarus Potteloereke

5. Brouwerij Contreras Valeir Divers Tripel


cheers,

dave hauslein
beer manager
415-255-0610

Healthy Spirits: Tilquin Gueuze

We just received a very limited shipment of Tilquin Gueuze in 750ml bottles. This is the last of it for the remainder of the year. Bottles will be behind the counter, limit 1 per customer, and available by request only. Beer of the Month Club members may reserve bottles by calling 415-255-0610.

cheers,

dave hauslein
beer manager
415-255-0610

Healthy Spirits: Russian River Temptation

Now in stock!

cheers,

dave hauslein
beer manager
415-255-0610