Medical Health Care team

Make the most of middle age with these health tips

Middle age. If we’re lucky, we’ll all eventually get there. These tips based on the latest research show you how a lifelong commitment to preventive health and an active social life will help you live life to the fullest in your middle years.

In an appearance on the NBC Today Show on Monday August 10, 2009, Courtenay Smith from Prevention magazine shared tips with Ann Curry on how to take control of your middle age years by being proactive with your health.

Five tips from Prevention’s “9 health rules your mom didn’t know” were highlighted during Smith’s appearance on the Today Show.

Have close friends
Research shows that having close friends can foster happiness, strengthen immunity, improve heart health, and recovery from illness – even save your life.

Prevention cites three studies that support this. A Harvard study of more than 2,800 women with breast cancer that found that those without close friends were 4 times more likely to die than women with 10 or more friends. A Swedish study found that having friendships is second only to not smoking for heart attack prevention.

And research from the University of California, San Diego, showed that happiness spreads through social networks, affecting not only friends but also friends of friends. Their study found that a person is 15% more likely to be happy if a close contact is happy.

Protect your heart health
Your heart health is key to maintaining an active lifestyle. New research suggests that you talk to your doctor about getting a CT coronary artery scan after menopause. The test measures calcium accumulation in arteries, a predictor of heart attack risk, and can identify this condition even when cholesterol tests are normal.

Adopting the Mediterranean diet would be beneficial too. The Mediterranean diet has been shown to prevent and even reverses heart disease. “Patients whose diets feature monounsaturated fats from olive or canola oil, nuts, and fish, along with abundant fruits and vegetables, reduced their recurrence of heart problems by 50 to 70%, according to the Lyon Diet Heart Study in France.”

Preserve your vision
Good nutrition and supplementation with vitamins C and E, beta-carotene, and zinc can help you preserve your vision and slowed vision loss by 25% in people with early signs of age-related macular degeneration, a disease that damages the retina. Unfortunately, this disease threatens the vision of about one-third of people over age 65.

Protect your hearing
One in three Americans has high-frequency hearing loss, according to a 2008 report in the Archives of Internal Medicine. To combat this, hearing experts from the University of Florida recommend that you eat more antioxidant-rich fruits and vegetables, take a standard multivitamin, and avoid very loud, sustained noises. Their research showed that an accumulation of free radicals, which are toxic to the tiny hair cells in the inner ear, contributes to hearing loss. Antioxidants in foods and supplements neutralize free radicals.

Maintain strong bones

In addition to calcium and D, a leading expert on osteoporosis at Creighton University tells us that protein is key to a healthy skeleton. Protein-rich dairy products like milk and yogurt are excellent sources of calcium because they contain the whole array of nutrients that you need for healthy bones. Numerous studies have shown that supplementing your diet with 1,000 IU of vitamin D3 daily becomes more important as you get older because the skin becomes less efficient at generating this nutrient from sunlight.

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