Living for Longevity: The Nutrition Connection - Research on Aging

this ucsd-tv program is presented by university of california television like what you learn visit our website or follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with the latest programs also make sure to check out and subscribe to our YouTube original channel you see TV prime available only on YouTube the Sam Andros Stein Institute for research on Aging is committed to advancing lifelong health and well-being through research professional training patient care and community service as a nonprofit organization at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine our research and educational outreach activities are made possible by the generosity of private donors it is our vision that successful aging will be an achievable goal for everyone to learn more please visit our website at aging UCSD edu tonight we are thrilled to have Vicki Neumann here tonight speaking with us mrs. Newman has been involved in nutrition and behavior change research at UC San Diego for more than 35 years and is always focused on wellness and disease prevention she is currently an associate clinical professor in the department of family and preventive medicine as a director of nutrition services for the UC San Diego cancer prevention and control program miss Newman manages the healthy eating and living program team of lifestyle counselors and Assessors who work by phone with study participants in San Diego and around the country we are so thrilled to have her here tonight so please welcome miss Vicki Neumann thank you so much can you all hear me okay I'm delighted to be here and to talk on this topic it's a topic near and dear to my heart as I'm a senior as well as you I think there's lots of very exciting research and I'm going to try to weave together some really practical guidelines here and a little bit of update on the literature we study the effect of lifestyle on disease process mostly focused on cancer so we have a help for weight loss study that is focused on women who are overweight and at risk for breast cancer should you know anybody that might want to participate in that and we also have a study that's looking at the effect of diet on a progression of early stage prostate cancer so I have flyers up in front if you're interested in either of those you can pick them up at the end and I also brought a copy of our cookbook called food for thought healing foods to savor we sell the book for $20 and all the proceeds go to support our healthy eating and living program so I think what I'll do is maybe just pass around a copy and you can kind of make its way around the room and see if you're interested we sell them for $20 and I'll here at the end if you're interested thank you okay so without further ado what we're going to be focusing on tonight is talking about energy balance a little bit I think one of the biggest challenges as we get older is since our metabolic rate goes down we actually don't need as much food so the food that we choose really needs to be of high nutrient density and so you're going to hear me you know describing what that means just to add to what you already know we also struggle with this whole issue of oxidative damage because just living just even metabolizing our food causes metabolic byproducts that cause oxidative damage which does damage to our tissues so that's where you hear a lot about the importance of antioxidant nutrients and we're going to be talking about foods that are rich in those I'm going to be saying something about inflammation and an anti-inflammatory diet a little bit about immune functioning and certain foods that help in the whole detoxification systems in the body of course we'll talk about skeletal issues it's really more than calcium but it's something that we all are concerned about as we get older a little bit about the nutrients involved in mood and memory and then a little something on telomeres because they've been in the news lately okay so first on energy balance you probably heard over the years that there's been a lot of research on lab animals and small things like worms indicating that calorie restriction improved longevity and a recent analysis of many studies has indicated at least in adults or in humans that calorie restriction probably isn't that helpful in terms of longevity and I for one was thrilled to read that because it's hard enough as we get older and our metabolic rate decreases you know we have to really keep cutting down the portions of food that we eat in order to stay at a healthy weight and that becomes really challenging to get all the key nutrients that we need for optimal functioning so just for example if you were normally at about 1,800 calories and you had to restrict what this former data used to indicate would be like a 30% restriction you would have to keep your calories under 1,300 to be at that it's just almost impossible to get all the key nutrients that you need when you're that low in fact you really need 1600 to 1800 calories per day of pretty energy or nutrient-dense food to get all the nutrients that would really be necessary for optimal functioning so I think one of our big challenges as we get older is holding on to lean body mass so that's kind of where the exercise component comes in and nature has this kind of relentless wish it seems to as my son would say wants to recycle our molecules so we do have a tendency to lose muscle mass as we get older and we really need to work against that by doing you know weight varying exercise and if we keep our muscle mass optimum then we require more calories because our metabolic rate goes up so we get to eat more food so you know that's a good incentive to to exercise so kind of along with this whole energy issue is this concept of circulation as really being key to energy and the more energy and the more circulation we have really the more life we have you could say and probably the better we feel and for those of you that do acupuncture or go to various what we call complementary and alternative medicine practitioners they talk about Qi or energy and I like to think about it in terms of kind of the dance between exercise and what we eat and both of those are important in this concept of circulation and energy regular exercise helps to keep the blood flowing and it also helps in waste removal and the blood of course is what delivers nutrients to our tissue but it's also what takes away the toxic byproducts and the other thing that I've come to realize which helped me do exercise regularly is moving is really important to making - draining the lymph system which is kind of like the body's you know sewer system we need to move our body to move the lymph and that's really important it's a good reason to be exercising regularly and I guess the other thing about exercise just quickly is and you've probably been reading this it's not just a nice bout of exercise once a day but it's it's really exercising even for five minutes every hour that turns out to be much more important than big bout of exercise infrequently in terms of kind of the nutritional component of circulation it's really the diet that we've been hearing about for a long time it's a it's a diet that's lower in fat but not necessarily as restrictive as we once thought and you'll be hearing me talk a lot more about the quality of the fats that we eat and the balance of fats is being important but we do know that the saturated or harder fats tend to make the blood thicker and therefore we don't have as much circulation and that is kind of an issue we also want more plant foods to get more protectors and those are what are going to give us those antioxidants to protect our tissues and protect the lining of our blood vessels so that they keep on doing a good job delivering nutrients and taking away toxins and then of course we'll talk a little bit about fiber and because that's really important for the digestive system to work properly to get that waste out of our bodies so a concept that helps me lately think about all of this is living more in what's called in sync with our genes and trying to eat less processed food and eat more food that's under processed and has a good array of these protectors in it if we think about our genetic heritage we used to exercise pretty regularly so we need to move our bodies and protect our muscle mass as much as possible and it's good to as I said to move more regularly through the day these plant foods that are the most protective are the ones that have what I call big color and strong flavor so I'll give you some examples of those later and you can be thinking about that we're also going to focus on healthy fats carbohydrates one of the things that I've realized as I've gotten older is I have to really be careful of carbohydrates even whole grains and the problem is as we get older we like the sweet taste of carbs but those are the ones that we probably need to cut down as much as possible and focus instead on getting carbohydrates from vegetables and from fruits in their whole form rather than juice beverages are an issue even the non-caloric beverages and so we need to choose carefully and another thing that's good to keep in mind in terms of being in sync with our genes is to allow ourselves to experience hunger at least thirty minutes two or three times a day rather than just constantly be eating you know to kind of let everything rest okay so there's a really great book that you might want to read called super normal stimuli or how primal urges over ran their evolutionary purpose it's by Daedra Barrett and it is a very helpful book in helping us to understand how the current food environment is very not helpful in terms of guiding us to the right choices and a lot of the the processed foods that are so prevalent today actually act almost like addictive drugs and there's some very interesting work I cited one of the ones that I just actually saw this afternoon but even the non-caloric beverages actually when we take those feeling like we're doing a good thing because it helps with weight control those have actually now been shown to increase our sweet hour wishing or searching for more sweet foods so for a long time I've kind of wondered why people keep using non-caloric sweeteners because they've never been shown to actually prevent weight gain but somehow we still think somehow they're going to and now they've actually shown that they may actually be leading us to eat more which is worrisome the high fructose corn syrup sweeteners are also an issue which and they're found just all through processed food and you may have read something about this but it's good to realize that the increase in these high fructose corn syrup sweeteners have really tracked along very very clearly with rising obesity rates and part of the reason for that may be that when we get more fructose that's not in something like a piece of fruit that has fiber that fructose doesn't tell our body that we've gotten energy there's a delay and so we keep on wanting to eat so it's a good reason to try to really reduce processed foods and especially processed foods that have been made with these high fructose corn syrup sweeteners so we talked about a plant-based diet as a diet being the one that we'd all like to be working on trying doesn't have to be all plants a little bit of animal food is good high quality protein but we really want to look at our plate and see mostly vegetables fruits whole grains and beans on it and maybe just a little bit of you know meat fish or poultry or some dairy products the plant foods give us these phytochemicals which are the chemicals produced by the plants to protect them from damage from the environment it's those phytochemicals that give color taste and fragrance to food and so think about how pleasant it is you know to eat a plate of colorful flavorful vegetables nature guides us to those foods that give us the nutrients that we need these plant foods are also filled with antioxidants and anti-inflammatory components and they they also help very much in the detoxification systems in the body particularly the sulfur-containing vegetables you've all probably are already eating kale you know about cabbage and broccoli and arugula but all of those cabbage family vegetables that have that sulfur bite you know that tastes kind of like mustard they actually increase the activity of detoxification enzymes in the body so the more of those you get in the better and I think the other thing that's good to think about in terms of plant foods and vegetables for example is environmental stress actually makes the plants put more of these protective chemicals into the plant it's the plants way of trying to protect itself so if you think about if you've ever had arugula you know from the farmers market that has like little nibbles out of it from the insects that are biting on it it'll have a really strong flavor because the plant has tried to put more of these compounds into the leaves to dissuade the pests from eating it and those strong flavored chemicals that it's putting in the plants putting into the leaves actually are very helpful for us they're helpful in detoxification so the guidance is to get five to nine servings of colorful and flavorful fruits and vegetables a day and the range is based on your body size and caloric intake so little people need five servings if you can see how tall I am I'm supposed to stand here by the mic I'm about five foot seven so I'm kind of a middle sized person I need seven servings and people that are taller than me probably need eight or nine servings a serving is 1/2 cup cut up fruit or vegetable or if it's something like raw spinach it would be a whole cup because when you cook it you know how it musha's down and the more colorful the the plant food that you're eating the better so you want something that's colorful all the way through and I always pick on zucchini but zucchinis green on the outside which indicates that it has a lot of carotenoids but you cut through it and it's colorless so you'd much rather go with spinach or broccoli or something that's green all the way through or you know yellow squash or a carrot rather than something that you cut through and it's colorless there's no bad fruit or vegetable and the more you eat the better but colorful all the way through is your very best bit so when you think about color you think about you know oranges and greens and purples the orange colors and the red colors have a lot of carotene or carotenoids which are the raw material from which your body makes retinol or vitamin A that's critically important for your immune system to work properly and it's really important for the health of your epithelial cells which are like your skin cells they line your gastrointestinal tract and your urinary genitourinary tract so a whole lot of our body is epithelial cells and that retinol made from carotenoids is really important when we do studies we ask folks in our studies to eat enough colorful fruits and vegetables that the palms of their hands get a little bit on the orange side so that's kind of a quick and dirty way for you to determine if you've taken in enough because your body will make retinol from the carotenoids and then once you've kind of filled up the tank it will start to store those in the fat pads in the bottoms of your feet in the palms of your hands and then after that has been exceeded you know and you can't store anymore then you'll start to poop out orange and that's fine it just means that you filled the tank okay so colorful is good this is a whole list of cruciferous vegetables so arugula broccoli Brussels sprouts cabbage all really wonderful sources of these sulfur containing compounds that help in detoxification and please note at the bottom rutabagas and turnips because it's winter and these winter root vegetables we've sort of forgotten about rutabagas and turnips but we need to kind of rediscover them and start putting them into our soups and stews it'll add a nice richness and it also adds these protective compounds that are really good for us you'll notice that the slide says best to eat raw or lightly cooked this is especially true for things like broccoli it when we overcook think about cabbage if you overcook it and you smell all that sulfur in your house so that's indicating that it's not going into your body to do you good so under cooking is a good thing okay and then a citrus fruit it's really nice if you could actually eat the orange as opposed to always trying to get your vitamin C from orange juice because when you eat the orange you're getting a lot of other nutrients besides vitamin C that are very protective and important including some wonderful types of what we call gelling fibers that are very helpful so this was just one study that was recently published and interesting it came from the Nurses Health Study and they actually evaluated 74 thousand women track them for 12 years and one of the things that they noted was that they came in at an average of five servings of fruits and vegetables per day those that increase their fruit and vegetable intake went up to the higher part of that range up to nine servings a day actually had benefit in terms of weight gain there was much less obesity and those that cut their fruits and vegetables which would be kind of a normal thing that people often do when they get older and move less there was actually more obesity so there was benefit to the fruit and vegetable intake and this was in young adults not older adults but I kind of loved it this is also a recent study just published and out of New Zealand and they actually were they found that the young adults that they studied approximately when they were getting more fruits and vegetables they actually had a positive effect on their mood and in the following day and so I thought you know another good reason to eat fruits and vegetables okay fiber rich foods we know are helpful we think of them as being important for gastrointestinal functioning they're wonderful sources of these phytochemicals I think you probably have heard a lot about the glycemic load or the effect of food on the rise in blood sugar after the meal when we eat a meal that has more fiber in it we have less of an acute rise in blood sugar and that's a good thing in terms of diabetes risk as we get older we also of course feel full on fewer calories so they're less there's less chance of gaining weight we know it's very important to get fiber in terms of normal bowel function and certain fibers are very helpful in controlling cholesterol levels and so that's beneficial in terms of cardiovascular health and I guess the newest thing with fiber that we've come to appreciate recently have you heard this term gut biome you know this new appreciation for this kind of wonderful set of bacteria and other things in our gastrointestinal tract and it turns out that the soluble type fibers that we eat are actually food for some of these you could call them probiotic or the healthy bacteria in our gut and so they actually feed those bacteria and the bacteria then in turn make substances that help keep the lining of the gut healthy so you know we think of fiber is just kind of like a brush that goes through and comes out the other end but there's certain types of fiber that actually feed those gut bacteria and keep our gut healthier and happier and one of the things that we've come to appreciate is the important role that a healthy gut plays in immune functioning when we have dysfunction in our gut we actually have compromised in terms of immune functioning so keeping healthy a healthy gut and you certainly hear a lot about it you know they're always telling us to use these various yogurt products like Activia but the truth is that if you get soluble fiber on a regular basis you're also feeding those healthy bacteria and keeping a better balance in your gut that helps to keep your gut happy so how much fiber do we need we need 25 to 35 grams per day if you could get even more than that that would be fine quick rules of thumb are you could say there's about 2 grams of fiber sometimes a bit more but you can average 2 for every serving of fruit or vegetable so if you're a 5 add a fruit and vegetable person you're going to get 10 grams of fiber from getting your fruits and vegetables in if you're a 9 a day you're going to get 18 you know so the more the merrier whole grains are going to give you 3 grams on average per serving and a serving of whole grain would be a slice of 100% whole wheat bread or a half a cup of cooked grain like oatmeal do any of you ever cook wheat berries yeah good if you haven't tried that sometime that's the the wheat berry or grain that's you know unchanged and you cook it up like you would brown rice it's a wonderful source of fiber it makes a really nice peel off you can put celery and onion and some other vegetables in and maybe toast up some some seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds and make yourself a kind of vegetarian pilaf or you can eat it cold the next morning with grated apple and raw almonds and some raisins and it really makes a wonderful breakfast cereal that's incredibly high in fiber and you'll have to chew it a lot so you know for those of us concerned about our chin line as we get older you'll you might actually feel a little sore because you have you have to chew it so much so that's a good thing to try cooked beans peas beans or lentils give you about 6 grams of fiber in every half cup cooked one of my favorite beans that I like to cook from scratch is mung beans have any of you tried boiling up mung beans so some of you good so you know we think of mung beans is just bean sprouts you know that's kind of the way that we are used to eating them but you can they're just those little you know they're small green round beans and they cook up probably in about 40 minutes like lentils do oh they're delicious if you don't let them get too mushy once they've cooked and softened you can toss them with extra virgin olive oil and I like to put in the zest of a couple of limes and a little salt and pepper and it's just delicious and you can make a sauce later with fire roasted tomatoes and put it over pasta you know you could make it in a soup it kind of you can cook up a nice sort of for the week and do different things with it so trying to get some beans in every day as a wonderful way to get in extra fiber for valve function it means also are a good source of this soluble fiber that the gut bacteria like so sometimes people ask me how do you determine if a cereal product is a whole grain product and the way that you determine that is it should say whole sprouted or malted wheat or grain as a first ingredient if it just says wheat flour that means white flour so that wouldn't necessarily be a whole grain product and another way of determining it is if it gives you at least 3 grams of fiber per serving so that's kind of your rule of thumb for a whole grain I like to use the slide kind of as a wake-up call about salad bars because really lettuce is not a good source of fiber so it's wonderful if you can make salads that actually have chopped vegetables in them if you go to a salad bar try to put as many vegetables on your plate as possible and only if there's room left use a little bit of lettuce so it's interesting to realize that a half a cup of kidney beans like you'd get on a salad bar has the fiber equivalent of about 8 cups of lettuce and you know like none of us are going to eat eight cups so try to think about you know those mediterranean chopped vegetable salads try to do more of those to get extra fiber into your diet and with regard to soluble fiber your goal is 5 to 10 grams a day out of that 25 to 35 total fiber and the soluble fiber lowers cholesterol levels and it also helps to feed the bacteria as I talked about so the cooked beans the half cup is going to give you 3 to 5 grams which is you know almost your goal for the day and if you can eat a whole orange ok and I don't mean necessarily the outer peel as well but try to get some of that white inner peel when you cut the orange that's going to give you 2 grams of this soluble fiber flax which you see at the top there is a great source of fiber and it's so much better if you're going to you know be interested in those omega-3s that they you know tell you to eat your flax oil to get them so much better for you to actually use flax seeds grind them up into a flax meal because then you're going to get the healthy fat and the extra fiber which is really important for health and you can see some other choices but if if you do a nice job of eating your fruits and vegetables you'll you'll get the soluble fiber that you need so a couple of words about glycemic load because as we mentioned before you want to try to have a diet that has a low glycemic load which means a diet generally that's higher in fiber but the other thing that's really important as far as glycemic load is that you pay attention to particle size so I have to give you an example of oatmeal for you know just to get this across old-fashioned oats or Scottish oats would be your best choice if you really want to get the full benefit from oats from the whole grain oats once you get into the you know the quick-cooking ones they've reduced the particle size so it cooks quicker and as you reduce the particle size you you kind of lose the benefit of the fiber because you're going to have your blood sugar levels go up faster and if you talk about the instant oats that come in those packets that have sugar added you kind of don't want to think about those as whole grains actually you know that's more like a dessert you could say because it's going to raise your blood sugar really quickly so glycemic load a high glycemic load diet which would have a lot of refined carbohydrates in it and be low in fiber is correlated with obesity which then actually increases insulin resistance and increases the tendency toward adult onset diabetes and we know that a diet that has a high glycemic load increases the chances of diabetes there's also a connection with cancer risk as your insulin resistance goes up your insulin levels and insulin like growth factor go up and that can actually drive the growth of cancer cells so you know we think of glycemic load as it relates to diabetes but we probably also want to be thinking of it as not a great thing in terms of cancer risk and then the higher the glycemic load the more problems we tend to have with blood lipid levels there tends to be a relationship with higher triglyceride levels and higher LDL cholesterol which are both correlated with cardiovascular risk so if you want to have a diet that has a lower glycemic load then you go with non starchy vegetables okay so that's pretty much all vegetables except for things like potatoes fruits are fine they actually have a low glycemic load and that's because when you eat fruit you're getting the fiber that comes with it whereas when you take fruit juice you've lost the fiber all grains even whole grains are considered more high glycemic load so if you're really concerned about blood sugar control you need to be really watching grains of all kinds and certainly the more refined ones or problem to lower glycemic load then more fiber in the meal is helpful but also a source of healthy fat in the meal okay is it a good thing and will help to lower the rise in blood sugar after the meal so we were going to talk a little bit about inflammation and an anti-inflammatory diet it turns out that the fat that we eat and the fat that's on our body both contribute to inflammation and inflammation is correlated to lots of different chronic diseases so when we follow an anti-inflammatory diet we will feel better and we will have a lower chance of these chronic diseases to adhere to an anti-inflammatory lifestyle we want to avoid excess weight especially the kind that's in the middle okay which is so common as we get older we also want to reduce fatty foods but as much as reducing fatty foods we want to think about the ones that we're choosing so to minimize fried at the savory snack foods and fast foods go easy on things like salad dressings and certainly cut down on sweeps that have fats in them with regard to salad dressings I think it's a great idea - I'm actually kind of cautious about most salad dressings I think it's a good idea to try to get into using an extra virgin olive oil and just tossing it lightly through your vegetables before you put on you know your lemon lime or your vinegar or the sour part when you mix up a salad dressing ahead of time I I've noticed that it takes a lot more to coat the lead so many of you have that experience so another thing about extra-virgin olive oil I like to spend a lot of money on a really good one because then I'm a lot more cautious about how much I use so consider that in terms of reducing inflammation we know that seafood fish and seafood are quite helpful because they're rich in those omega-3 fatty acids that have anti-inflammatory properties so the guideline is to have fish or seafood two or three times a week if possible but do be careful of farmed salmon it was kind of discouraging to see an EPA warning that suggested that we limit farmed salmon to one survey per month and the surveying was a 3-ounce serving which is the size of a deck of cards so you know go easy and then plenty of those plant foods that we talked about that have those anti-inflammatory compounds in them so I'd like you to think a little bit about fat balance the pro farm salmon was the one was that was specifically pointed out but I think that's an interesting question that we probably need to look into a little bit more in terms of the pro-inflammatory fats the ones that are pro-inflammatory tend to be corn cottonseed soy sunflower and safflower type oils so you know we've always thought of those as being heart healthy and in moderation they're fine but they do tend to be more pro-inflammatory so we want to be a little cautious and we need to decrease our intake of meat and fish that are fed these speaking of farmed okay because farmed fish often are our fed grain soy corn and things like that it's not that the these polyunsaturated fats are inherently bad it's the amount of them that we're eating we're getting like it's almost 16 to 1 if you think about these pro-inflammatory fats to the anti-inflammatory fats and so rather than just eating tons and tons of fish to try to get up to the amount of polyunsaturated you know that we need I think the idea is to try to cut down excessive intake of these polyunsaturated so that we get in a better balance in terms of pro and anti-inflammatory the anti-inflammatory fats are found in fish seafood flaxseed and the pasture raised livestock so you hear a lot about grass-fed cattle for example as being a better source of these healthier fats it's good to realize that all cattle is grass-fed in general until it's taken into the feedlot and fed corn and soy which then changes the carcass fat to a more pro-inflammatory carcass fat so what we're seeing is now entering the marketplace or more where they're calling grass-finished cattle which means they're fed grass until they're killed and really up until about a hundred years ago that's the way that beef was so we have really changed the the fat that's in the meat that we eat which then becomes us so we need to shift this back in a healthier balance here's some general guidelines on fats I think that we want to realize that while at one point we were trying to cut our fats way way way down do you all remember this was it called I want to say stay well but that's not snack you know what snack well thank you back when I started at the Cancer Center in the middle 90s we were very focused on a very low fat diet as being the very best diet for chronic disease prevention and the food manufacturers you know took us up on that and cut fat way down and processed food but then added a lot of carb to it so that isn't necessarily a good thing for our health what we really want to do is have a moderate intake of fat probably up to 30% of our calories is fine but then we want to choose fats carefully so one of the things that we want to think about is fat soluble contaminants and when we're eating animals that have a long lifespan they've had a lot of time to get contaminants and concentrate those in their fat mass so a good general guideline is to eat lower on the food chain which would mean smaller animals with a shorter life span okay think chickens okay I brought my sardines okay so if you're thinking about seafood I'm a big proponent of sardines these are little fish that don't live too long so in general you don't get quite as much buildup of toxins that are found out there in the environment I mentioned about farmed fish when you can afford organic that is a way of reducing your exposure to fat soluble contaminants and one other thing though I don't know that I don't see people that have a lot of weight to lose here but if you know somebody that's tempted to go on one of these very extreme diets and lose weight quickly when you're losing weight at greater than two pounds in a week you are dumping a whole lot of Steward environmental toxins out of your fat mass probably at a time when you're also not taking in adequate amounts of nutrients that would be required for your detoxification systems to be working optimally so rapid weight loss is generally not a good plan from that standpoint saturated fats and hydrogenated fats or fats that are hard at room temperature we really need to moderate our intake of those as much as possible so limiting or avoiding full fat dairy and red meats is still a good plan and avoiding processed foods that are made with those and then rancid fats or another thing that just add oxidative stress to our body so aged cheese's a meats and deli meats it's good to really cut those back as much as you can the healthy fats are the ones listed here so the healthiest fat is actually fats that's found in a whole food so that's where nuts and seeds come in avocado even eating you know olives even better than olive oil for example but the monounsaturated fats which you know avocado and olive oil serve are the ones we most think about are still considered good choices this was just recently published last year and this was kind of interesting in terms of the type of fats and this was looking at they call folks over 65 older or elderly so I'm one of those and I term elderly kind of bothers me but let's just say seniors I guess this was a big group and this was from the Women's Health Study and they were evaluating the types of fats that women were eating and higher saturated fat intake was associated over the period of the study with more cognitive decline and problems with memory than in those that had a higher monounsaturated fat intake so that's just kind of one more reason to be careful of the types of fats that we eat in terms of osteoporosis prevention or trying to maintain a good bone mass weight-bearing exercise we know is important adequate calcium intake adequate vitamin D we actually need to get enough protein because we kind of forget that our bones really are made of protein matrix in which you know minerals are placed and it turns out that potassium is another important mineral in terms of bone health and the things we need to be careful of are excess caffeine you've probably read that a little caffeine is actually good for our memories but we don't want to have more than 300 milligrams per day which if you do kind of light coffee that would be like three cups if you do kind of the stronger expresso type you know less than that being too thin is not a good thing in terms of osteoporosis cigarette smoking we know puts us at risk and certainly excess sodium or salt which makes us lose more calcium through the kidneys so this is a little hard to read but we need to get 1200 milligrams of calcium in per day I'd like you to see where you get it from food because there's a tendency I think for people to kind of forget what they're getting from food especially if they're not you know doing milk products on a regular basis and thinking that they need to supplement all of that on a regular basis so if you're doing milk products it's pretty easy to get there but you might need to still supplement a little bit a couple of things that you might notice here I mean shedder cheese wouldn't be the greatest choice because it's high in saturated fat probably a good choice would be a one or two percent or nonfat milk which is going to give you 300 milligrams per cup and if you think about you know say you had cereal and a little milk in your coffee in the morning and maybe a yogurt during the day you you might get 600 just from milk products and then you could think okay are there other things I could eat to sort of fill in around that and maybe you don't quite get to 1200 but if you're routinely not getting to 1200 then you do a little bit of calcium supplementation but don't feel like you need to go out and use the whole 1200 as a supplement did you notice sardines there in the middle 140 milligrams in this can okay but you've got to eat the bones and the same with salmon or mackerel you know now they have the the canned salmon without the bones but it's the bones that are going to give you the calcium so you want to chew on those bones tofu that's made with calcium salts is also a good source of calcium but there are many types of tofu on the market that are not made with calcium salts so you do want to read your nutrition label and make sure that you're getting the type that actually has calcium in it and then your leafy greens like kale are going to give you some calcium also but you just need bigger portions but that you know that adds in a little bit and I don't know if you like corn tortillas but corn tortillas that are actually made in the traditional way with lime if you had five corn tortillas made with lime through the day you'd get as much calcium as a cup of milk so you know we don't think of corn tortillas as being a source of calcium but actually they are so say you're using a non milk beverage you know like a soy milk or rice milk or something else you really want to look at your Nutrition Facts label and just keep in mind that the daily value for calcium with regard to a label is a thousand milligrams so if it says thirty percent daily value you know per serving for calcium it's easy to do the math thirty percent of a thousand is 300 milligrams some of the others are a little more challenging but there are plenty of soy milks that I've seen like at Trader Joe's that are not calcium fortified so you know you need to make sure that if you're not using Dairy Milk and you're using some kind of substitute and you need or you want to get calcium from that substitute read your label and make sure that it has calcium in it now a couple of things about calcium supplements that I just think are good to realize the the common form of calcium supplement is calcium carbonate and calcium carbonate as in tums lower stomach acidity so if you're using a lot of calcium carbonate and not getting calcium from food you could be affecting stomach acidity which then affects the how well the enzymes in your stomach are able to digest food and you might actually experience a little bit of gas because you're not digesting things as well as you could so I'm not a big fan of calcium carbonate if I'm going to supplement I tend to recommend calcium citrate as a form of calcium that's closer to what's often found in food and if you are going to use a calcium supplement to kind of plug in the holes that are missing from calcium in your diet then I think it's really a good idea to get a calcium that also has some vitamin D in it and probably a little bit of magnesium because that would be more similar it's closer to what you'd be getting in a food in terms of calcium magnesium probably at least half as much magnesium as the calcium so if you it was 500 milligrams of calcium it would need to have like 250 of magnesium or something like that so keep that in mind one other thing because there's a tendency to want to kind of get the calcium down you know at one time and just you're done with it but you actually absorb it better with small amounts over time so try not to take more than 500 milligrams at a time if possible there's a lot of interaction with different drugs so again using a little bit of calcium to make sure we get that 1200 milligrams a day is a good idea but realize that you don't want to be using more calcium than you need and some of the drugs that you take may also be impacted and one other thing that recently has come to our attention is that taking a big bolus of calcium at one time may not be a good idea in terms of cardiovascular risk so this may not turn out to be a real worry but there's been a few articles recently that lead us to at least be cautious you know and I've done a lot of counseling of women over the years and you know sometimes people are using 2,000 milligrams you know just like all at one time so smaller amounts think about what you're getting in your food add a little bit just to kind of top it off is there is a good plan and antacids are used very commonly in our culture today and antacids reduce stomach acidity that's why we use them which affects calcium absorption and there has been some correlation with higher hip fracture risk so you know just keep that in mind you know if you need to use antacids then that's important to do but I'm really upset when I see these advertisements have you seen these on television where they're telling you to use an antacid so you can eat a corndog and I come going I don't think so so you know judicious use lots of interesting information coming out all the time on vitamin D population studies linked vitamin D deficiency to autoimmune diseases cancer cardiovascular disease depression dementia and factious disease etc but the Institute of Medicine said that right now the literature only completely supports its benefit in terms of musculoskeletal health so what we want to do is make sure that we have adequate levels of vitamin D floating around in our body and most of the time physicians are checking that more routinely than they used to because as older people we are more at risk for lower levels of vitamin D we don't make as much vitamin D with exposure to Sun for example and most of us aren't even going out in the Sun because we're concerned about skin cancer or if we do we're putting sunscreen on and that would block the production of vitamin D so as older folks we need at least six hundred units per day of vitamin D it seems to be safe to take up to four thousand units I would always err on the side of caution so I don't think that I would push the envelope to go all the way up there probably you know a thousand or 2,000 is okay but you know remember that six six hundred is what we are recommended to be taking on a daily basis and the d3 is a more biologically active form and there are more supplements that come in that form than there used to be there this issue again about high doses which they have done sometimes if blood levels are very low they'll give you like a bolus dose to try to get it up but that actually was shown to increase fracture risk and older women in a recent couple of studies so again it seems better to be using lower doses if your levels are low you're under a doctor's care anyway and you'll be given you know a recommended amount to be taking and then you'll be rechecked do pay attention to your vitamin D levels it's important for calcium absorption and magnesium absorption calcium we think of for bone health but magnesium is another one that's incredibly important for nerve transmission and muscle contraction so if we're low in d we're not absorbing either one of those two nutrients well this whole issue of our western style diet and its impact over time on acid-base balance is something that we need to be thinking about because the way that we're eating today a high animal protein diet that's high in grains tends to have a more kind of acidifying potential and this acid producing diet is associated with more osteoporosis with high blood pressure kidney stones and and problems with kidney function over time if you think about eating a lot of grains and animal foods and especially think about how your diet may have changed over time I think as we get older we may not want to cook as much sometimes if you're hungry at night you might just sit down and you know have some cereal rather than do a dinner that has vegetables for example so we're displacing vegetables with grain and that has a more acidifying potential in our body and animal foods are also they have a more acidifying potential as well in terms of protein we need to get an adequate amount we just don't want to get too much so I think this is in your handout so that you can check for yourself to see how much you need but if you're an active adult you need 0.4 to 0.6 grams per pound of body weight so you can kind of pick your weight there and find the range that's right for you I usually just summarize that by saying somewhere between like 55 and 100 grams is probably the right range to be in if you're smaller person lower side of that if you're a bigger person higher if you're somebody who's working out of the gym and building muscles you would need more but for most of us getting somewhere between 55 and 100 is probably what we're after and that's important to get enough to keep you know ourselves healthy I mean protein is important for building and repair immune function and even for for our skeletal system this and I think this is in your handout also how do you get that 50 or 100 every ounce of cooked meat fish or poultry gives you 7 grams so I just look at like my index finger okay if that was like a little slice of chicken like a chicken finger or something or chicken tender that would be 1 ounce so that's 7 grams there and if I did 3 fingers you know or a deck of cards that would be 3 times 7 or 21 so if you have a couple of ounces at your lunchtime and maybe 3 ounces at dinner you know you're going to get more than enough protein you also get protein from things like pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds milk yogurt cheese would give you protein you certainly get a little bit in grain and I think what people forget is that they get protein even in vegetables so there's a couple of grams of protein in every half a cup and we forget about that now if you just ate vegetables the protein quality is not great but we hardly ever just eat vegetables all by themselves we tend to you know mix it in with some other things and as long as we get the complimentary protein within about three to five hours we're fine so you know again moderation and variety is is a good general guideline in terms of protein adequacy this is an important slide that I'd like you to to look at because the alkaline minerals are really important calcium magnesium and potassium and I think we're pretty comfortable now that we know where calcium comes from magnesium is a really important nutrient that we often are not getting enough of and it's found in dark greens and legumes whole grains nuts and seeds and milk products and then potassium comes in fruits and vegetables and in other foods as well but fruits and vegetables are particularly rich and we need vitamin D to absorb both calcium and magnesium I don't know if you heard the news a couple I think was a few months ago at this point but there was this really interesting study that they did where they gave folks a pretty high dose of a potassium citrate and they found that actually it was beneficial in terms of improving bone density own structure and fracture risk in healthy elderly folks seniors over the age of 65 the recommended potassium intake is 4700 milligrams per day and believe me you need to eat a lot of plant foods to get there okay a half a cup of fruit or vegetable is going to give you about 160 milligrams a half cup of potato preferably a sweet potato so you get more carotenoids it's going to give you 425 and a half cup of cooked beans and legumes about 310 so the more plant foods you eat the more potassium is in your diet and that's good for bone health but it's also pretty important for things like blood pressure control so I think that we really need to pay attention again to plant foods from the potassium standpoint and when we eat plant foods and don't just depend on potassium supplements then we're going to also be displacing things like too much grain you know or other sweet or processed foods which probably would have less potassium and more sodium okay so kind of too much information right okay I think we're just about ready for questions food and mood this is just kind of want you to think about this a little bit the nutrients that are very important in keeping our neurological systems optimally functioning include the B vitamins and deficiency symptoms of deep B vitamins include irritability quarrelsome Neffs depression vague fears emotional instability decrease ability to cope with life's problems confusion and forgetfulness so not to say that that's the key or the only thing but if you notice any of those symptoms just think about have you been getting foods with that are good sources of B vitamins which include the leafy green vegetables legumes your mung beans peas beans or lentils whole grains nuts and seeds meat fish and poultry and milk products all good sources and do any of you ever take brewers yeast or nutritional yeast like in a smoothie no well if you've never tried it go to sprout and in the bins you know they have flake nutritional yeast it's kind of like a bright yellow color it's a wonderful source of protein and B vitamins and you can stir a little bit you know into a smoothie you can put a little bit into a juice and get some extra B vitamins and it really helps to nourish your nerves and it's quite beneficial b12 deficiency is something that we need to be on the lookout for as we get older we don't absorb b12 as well because the acidity in our stomach decreases and there are some people that genetically actually lose intrinsic factor as they get older and so we just need to be aware that this can happen deficiency symptoms include tiredness and weakness forgetfulness and depression you know I I don't mean to just say it can only be from b12 but it's one of the things to think about there are folks I actually had a really good friend a very healthy looking woman who went to her doctor for a couple of years saying that she had numbness and tingling in her hands and feet and this was around menopause time and no one took blood and everyone said it you know was probably just menopausal symptoms and finally two years later they took blood and found out that she was b12 deficient and she had a familial tendency to it so you just need to you know be aware that this can be a cause of some of these symptoms folks that are more at risk for b12 deficiency include people that do not eat any animal products people that use too much alcohol and then folks that don't absorb adequately which it can include people that chronically use antacids folks that have celiac disease if you're overcooking meats which we tend to do today because you know we're worried about pathogens folks with colitis or a short bowel syndrome so it's just something to think about and as promised telomeres okay because you've been reading about those so telomeres are the protective caps at the end of chromosomes and each time a cell divides the telomeres shrink and it seems like our cells kind of have a lifespan and when the telomeres get too short that cell dies so it turns out that psychological stress resilience healthy lifestyle and social connections are all really important to keeping healthy telomeres and in terms of lifestyle the things that are coming up in the literature that are helpful include physical activity which includes aerobic activity weight bearing and then you know holding on to lean body mass because again that's what tends to go as we get older if we're if we're not vigilant about it having a normal body composition is helpful so not getting you know too overweight and not getting too round around the middle and then the dietary things that are helpful include that a lot of the things we talked about plant foods fiber adequate vitamins the omega-3 fats DHA and EPA and lower intake of processed meats and the and also lower intake of the polyunsaturated fatty acids I kind of love this next bullet point though people that were preoccupied with trying to eat less which are called high restraint folks have higher cortisol stress hormones and shorter telomeres so even though I've told you all kinds of things about the best diet to follow don't get too stressed out about it because that can you know you'll lose the benefit so the bottom line is eat food and these come from Michael Pollan these first three I love that guy read all his books he says eat food not edible food-like products not too much and mostly plants great advice drink plenty of water look at this is still how much I have I was filled up I haven't even had my four cups yet today so I have a long way to go constantly we need to be getting fluid flushing through us to get the toxins out it's something that as we get older we don't feel thirst so we really have to like you know count up the cups eat slower exercises I've talked about and I like to say practice gratitude okay which helps to calm us down so we actually get the most benefit from the food and I think it's really nice to take a minute before a meal we used to say grace but if we don't do grace just think about what it took to bring that nourishing food you know to your plate and what it's going to do to protect your health so I think that's a good part of this as I mentioned we have some clinical trials so pickup brochures or fliers if you're interested on the way out and these are the healthy living eating and living guidelines that I talked about it's a little bit small and your handout but do work on maintaining a healthy weight which right now is a BMI between 20 and 30 enjoy a physically active lifestyle which is 30 to 60 minutes of moderate activity per day do you wear your pedometers okay yay because we're trying to get to 10,000 steps every day at least preserve muscle mass which is really a hard one as we get older to keep in mind but getting to the lifting weights doing upper body is really really important getting plenty of these plant foods with big color and strong flavor focusing on healthy fats as we talked about choosing carbohydrates carefully and trying to stay away from the processed types and then selecting beverages carefully so you'll notice that I'm not fond of fruit juices okay because they have a lot of carbs and no fiber so better that you eat the fruit and and actually water or herbal teas or your best beverage choice so I'm going to end it there and thank you so much for listening and I'll take questions ok so he's asking about orange juice with pulp and that's a better choice than orange juice without pulp but even better is actually eating an orange you know and that means cutting some of that whitener peel because that has those water soluble fibers that are so good for you know the gut bacteria and your cholesterol levels okay uh-huh you were next okay okay so he's talking about tomatoes a great choice everything that is big color is good tomatoes are big color okay so they're red and they're good for you he's talking about tomatoes great choice and actually tomato puree or tomato sauce would even be you know a really great choice because it's more concentrated so yeah excellent and you know I didn't call out every single food that's good for you but if it's got a big color it's good Tomatoes fall in that category okay who else yes both Chia and flax seed are good sources of the omega-3 fatty acids but they the type of omega-3 that they have in them which is alpha linoleic acid is not as biologically active as EPA and DHA which are found in seafood so if that's the source if you're not doing seafood and you're getting most of your omega-3s from either Chia or from flax you just especially with flax you need to grind it okay because it's got a really hard seed coat which is very good for you but if you don't break up the particles it's going to go straight through you okay you actually need let me just give you a four 500 milligrams of omega-3 equivalent you'd need about three tablespoons of flax meal okay so it you just would need like flax and your smoothie every morning to get what you need in terms of omega-3s okay okay let me go over here somebody back here okay he's asking about apples and bananas there's no bad fruit or vegetable and you know there's a lot to be said for apples an apple a day keeps the doctor away it's loaded with that soluble fiber that's so good for you so it misses out on the carotenoids but it has fiber bananas are a wonderful wonderful source of magnesium and potassium so I you know colorful is great but all are good okay and have different things to offer so those are two examples of less color but still good okay and by the way apples the benefit and you've always heard about leaving the skin on but a lot of those healthy nutrients are either in the skin or right under the skin and again think about why it's because the plant has put them there to protect the plant from damage from the environment so if we're going to eat an apple and we cut away the skin we've cut away some of the benefit okay okay over here I think it's great if you can afford organic because I think that's actually ultimately going to change our food supply to a healthier food supply we have really gone very far in a not healthy direction so I would let me also tell you about the Environmental Working Group website do you all know about the Environmental Working Group so they have a very helpful website that lists produce in terms of its likelihood of having contaminants from the environment and they they have lists you know like the Dirty Dozen and the safe dozen that sort of thing but they pour over the literature on pesticide contamination of produce and and do a wonderful service by posting that so you if you go to the ones that are most likely to be contaminated then that's where you'd want to spend your money on organic and then go to the bottom of the list least likely and maybe you don't have to spend the money on organic environmental working group yeah if you just google that you'll find it aha and speaking of websites and I'll get to you the other thing about omega-3s and fish and seafood do you all know about the Monterey Bay Aquarium website because that's a wonderful website that talks about the safest fish and seafood choices also they have purchasing guidelines that you can you know actually just print out and put your wallet and they're concerned about contaminants but they're also concerned about overfishing areas so they'll tell you the safest choices not only for health but for the environment and okay yes okay tumeric so she's asking about spices big flavor big flavor is a good thing so spices and herbs are always good to use as much of those as possible she's asking about tumeric which is very colorful it's like a mustard color and it's a primary ingredient in curries it's actually there's research indicating that it might have added cancer potential but and it has anti-inflammatory potential as well cinnamon has been shown to be beneficial in terms of diabetes care so lots of interesting things with herbs and spices the the trick with like dried herbs if you're going to use them is by small amounts and you know don't keep them till you know they have hardly any smell so at Costco you know they sell like Italian herbs and humongous containers and you know it might take you a year to get through that container you're so much better off going and buying a very small amount so when you open the jar it has like a pungent smell to it which again that smell is what tells you that there's biologically active compounds in it that are beneficial to your health okay you had a question back here so he's trying to get us to eat more lard and okay so his question was but the diet of his grandparents which was higher in saturated fat and hydrogenated fat and and I think this is a valid point that you're making but I'd like to think about also the environment in which our grandparents lived and grew up so it was there was less contaminants that were getting into that saturated fat for one thing and the other thing is as our grandparents did a lot more moving around than we do a whole lot more moving around so if we lived more like our grandparents we probably could tolerate a less restrictive diet so I think you make a good point I think you're talking about any red meat actually because I think that we need to be doing a better job of moderation and variety so smaller animals but having said that if we were living in Idaho or Montana or you know beef country and that's what was available I think that you know I think we have to eat what's available to us optimally it's not a great idea to be getting lots of those saturated you know the big animals optimally okay and you had a question okay so she's asking about small animals that are fed primarily corn and soy like chickens okay and I think that's a valid point if we can and we you know chickens don't run around like they used to chickens that were in you know that ran around would eat a variety of things and one of I mean we they still would be eating corn but if you think about it they were also sometimes eating insects or they were eating worms and when you squish a worm you know green goo comes out of it the green goo is is from leaves and the green goo is a source of omega-3 fatty acids so chickens that ran around and ate that kind of stuff did have a different you know carcass fat you could say all of what I'm telling you is kind of you know we're moving in a direction we're trying to make choices that are a little bit better for our health given what our food supply is and so if I had to shoes you know between eating big hunks of you know beef versus you know little bit of chicken I would still probably choose chicken having said that my favorite winters do I got some grass-finished beef I bought a half a pound of it because it was very expensive I got a nice cut so it wasn't just the stew meat you know in terms of fat cut up really tiny pieces okay sauteed it in olive oil with onions and then I put in some chicken broth organic I threw in an entire bag of baby carrots your tomatoes okay fire roasted tomatoes with peppers I chopped up a huge rutabaga a huge turn up into bite-sized pieces what else have I oh and I put a can of beans in it the white kidney beans or pinto beans or something and and I just let it cook for a couple of hours you know till it was this nice kind of winter stew and right before I served it I emptied a bag of baby spinach and let it wilt over the top oh and I also put a sweet potato in it so do you see what I mean by a little bit of meat is fine that's served for people so tons of color lots of flavor a little bit of animal protein some saturated fat but all together it was kind of this direction that we want to be moving in does that make sense okay question over here dark chocolate oh darn it well I'm a huge chocolate lover so let me address that immediately you you want to try to get at least 70% you know chocolate cocoa solids and if you go to 80 that would be great one of the things that I have had to do as I've gotten older I don't know if you're like this but I've always loved chocolate chip cookies but what did I love in the chocolate chip cookies the chips so now I don't eat chocolate chip cookies I just go right for the chocolate and you know I I go and buy really expensive like blunt you know green and black that the organic chocolate it's really expensive and and so it's organic and I just love a couple of squares of it and I savor it and part of what we teach in healthy living is the 80/20 rule you know so eight okay well that's really an important rule so eighty percent of the time you're good and the other 20% you can blow it but blow it with quality stuff okay so that's really and the other thing a general rule is if it gives you a great deal of joy that is good you know for longevity so you know make your chocolate count chocolate is a wonderful source of flavonoids which are protected or anti-inflammatory their antioxidant it has magnesium in it which is good you know I mean I can say I'm going to eat my chocolate so I don't get leg cramps you know like oh well so yeah chocolate is a very good choice and and again I would say you know if chocolate is what you like like eat the chocolate and not all this stuff around it you know because most of us can't afford all those extra calories of the cookie part you know or the cake part okay I'm going to end it now and if you want a book come on up you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 390,705

Rating: 4.6994796 out of 5

Keywords: healthy eating, diet, anti-inflammatory, aging

Id: wsLnPRUUGhQ

Length: 89min 30sec (5370 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2013