How can you avoid infection and live longer while keeping your body strong? What is Genetic Repair?
Your lifestyle has a lot more influence on your longevity than your inherited genetics have. Longevity is influenced by how you express your genes not which genes you happen to be born with. So, you ask, how do you change how you express your genes?
Think of a gene as a single strip of coded information with a tip that is wrapped neatly to prevent it from fraying. It is like a shoelace with a hard plastic tip for threading through your shoes. It is that tip, known as a telomere in our genes that needs to last and not fray or break up. If it breaks up and the gene itself frays there will be a greater incidence of damage to the genes ability to reproduce when it needs to repair tissue damages. Stress is the primary damaging factor for the telomere. Reducing your stress will add durability to your genetic ability so that it can more accurately repair your cells. The genes need to stay unfrayed so that they can reproduce with exact accuracy when the need arises. A frayed gene looses, rearranges and shifts around valuable coding of information. It is a lot like a CD that is damaged and can not be copied by your computer or a corrupted computer file, a frayed gene is not going to be copied accurately when it is needed for repair after injury or illness. It sounds simple, reduce your stress, maintain your genes' telomeres and improve your bodies ability to repair itself.
How can you enhance cell strength?
After looking at how to keep the genetic repair system healthy, we need to learn how to avoid wearing it out. Even the very best made and maintained shoelace will wear out its tip with excessive rethreading. Your body responds to damage the way a fire department responds to a fire. If overused or left un-repaired even the most efficient well-trained fire department will fail eventually. Things that can be avoided like sunburn, damage to the lungs from smoking, alcohol or drug abuse will over tax the repair system and call upon it to respond for repair too frequently. Reduce your exposure to these damaging elements and reduce your stress. You will be well on your way to keeping your cell repair system from wearing out too early.
For your general health a healthy weight is critical to maintaining strong cells. An easy measure of where your waistline should be is to take your height and divide by two. You waist measurement should be no more than half of your height measurement.
Power up!
We get our energy from our cells, specifically from the powerhouse of the cell known as the mitochondria, not from the sugar loaded double lattes or chocolate power bars that we often look for when we need a boost. When we power up our mitochondria rapidly, air raid style, we create a kind of pollution in our bodies, that pollution called, "free radicals," creates damage with in the body. That damage slows down the mitochondria. In order to fight this internal pollution; we need to eat plenty of colorful vegetables: reds, greens, oranges and blues. These will keep the body supplied with carotenoids and flavonoids. These carotenoids and flavonoids act like tough little scrubbing thirsty mops cleaning and soaking up the damaging pollutants in our bodies. Good diet habits go a long way towards saving your body from free radical pollutants.
Charge up your immune system.
We have all seen what damage an unprotected computer can suffer when attacked by a virus. We also know that we can protect our computers with firewalls and security services. Now if only we could build a firewall or hire a security service for our bodies to keep viruses and other infections at bay. Wait, we already have one. Our immune system, it is just such a firewall; the trick is to keep un-breached and strong. We are all exposed to millions of viruses, fungus and bacteria daily; sometimes they get the better of us. Usually though, we are able to fight off these marauding invaders without so much as the blink of an eye. As the body ages, usually the immune system slows down in its ability to respond to these nasty invaders. We become more vulnerable to infection and it becomes harder for our bodies to recover.
A key player in our immunity maintenance is the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is the tenth cranial nerve, it is also known as the pneumo-gastric nerve. It transmits an on going rapid-fire stream of information from the brain to and from both the lungs and the gut. Both of these areas of the body are subject to invasion from either air born infections in the case of the lungs, or foods gone wrong or the wrong food in the digestive system. The way that the vagus nerve deals with these invasions determines how well our body can fight off the invading organism. If the brain can manage the vagus nerve responses well, than your mind can handle its immune function well. It really is a case of, "mind over matter!" Meditation can give us greater power over our immune system's ability to respond to assaults. It is a tool that allows our minds to overcome stress and rebuild our immunity from the mind out.
Tibetan monks have found that after years of meditative practice they can trick their minds into believing that their bodies are warm even when they are surrounded by cold. They can sit in extremely frigid temperatures and despite the cold, steam rises off of their shoulders. Their bodies feel warm; they do not suffer the effects of the cold. They have taught their minds to send messages through the vagus nerve to their bodies telling them that they are warm, not cold. Their minds have managed to overpower their bodies.
This is not meant to suggest that you can meditate away pneumonia or a strep throat; but you may be able to prevent these illnesses from taking hold with daily meditation. Find some reading material that addresses meditation. Give it a try. You'll be surprised at your results.
Sticky sugar?
Sugar is sticky; we all know that. If spilled on our hands they become uncomfortably gluey and we reach for the sink to wash it off. If spilled on the kitchen floor and not wiped up, it shows as a dark spot where dirt sticks to it. It is the same way in our bodies. Sugar in our blood stream sticks to our blood proteins causing inflammation. In a healthy body with no excess of sugar, the body uses it sugar burning it for energy. In a body where there is too much of the sticky stuff, the body cannot use the sugar efficiently and it glues up the proteins. It goops up what ever it comes in contact with creating weakness and wanton destruction. It creates a need for frequent tissue repair. Repairs inside of your arterial walls if needed, are done with patches of LDL cholesterol, that's the bad cholesterol. If taken to extreme and too much repair is needed, you will wind up with a completely blocked artery and a stroke or a heart attack. To prevent this disastrous occurrence, eat more fruits and vegetables and more whole grain complex carbohydrates instead of simple sugars. Excess sugar also triggers the production of our bodies own LDL cholesterol which is the, bad cholesterol by shifting the thyroids hormones to make more of the bad cholesterol.
For further damage control keep your blood pressure within healthy limits by walking once a day for a half hour. Do not skimp on water, drink the recommended 8 glasses of water a day. Take frequent dietary portions of tomato products, tea and cinnamon as well as whole grains.
PBS referenced for information of telomores.
*This article is not intended to take the place of your physicians advice.*