by Mario Carini

Created on: August 17, 2010

No one can stop the clock. Aging is inevitable, but getting old does not have to mean getting sick. While the current belief is that you will eventually get sick and the only way to relief is by taking drugs, this reasoning does not fly in the face of those centenarians who still manage to get around without a cane or a walker.

Okinawa is famous for its centenarians. What's most remarkable is that they retain their youthfulness. Though the average age is some 81.2, they don't exhibit the ravages of heart disease, Alzheimer's or cancer that are so common to the average American.

Okinawa is not the only place where you can find a high life expectancy. Groupings of centenarians have also been found in the Caucasus mountains in Georgia, the Hunza Valley in Pakistan, the Vilcabamba in Ecuador, some of which have been recorded as living to 120 years.

Clearly, these facts point out the disease in old age is not inevitable.

Poor health in old age is the direct result of poor body management. Much of the blame can be put on the faulty diet that many have chosen to consume. A faulty diet creates more free radicals in the body and those free radicals ultimately damage the major body organs that lead to faster aging. Today's diet consist mostly of highly processed food to which unhealthy chemicals have been added.

While you may sincerely believe you are eating healthy every time you bring home produce from the supermarket, the truth is that the produce is hardly fresh. They come from farms that use chemical fertilizers on the soil to help plants grow and use pesticides to keep produce from insects. By the time you eat that “fresh” produce, you are consuming a diet of chemicals that adversely affect your health.

The centenarians of Okinawa consist on a diet of fish and vegetables, both of which are seldom found on todays Western dinner plates.

If the toxins weren't enough to make you sick, the environment is laced with pollutants. Even your tap water has traces of feces, drug residues and many other toxins that slip through the city filtration plants. The operators of the plants must weight the potential of disease against the cost of running the plants.

The environmental pollutants are bad enough, but most of us have chosen to live a life guaranteed to produce illness once we get older. Smoking, heavy drinking and a high stressed lifestyle simply add to the toxic overload in the body. Many of us don't exercise enough. A sedentary lifestyle is one of the main causes for weight gain. Since most people find it difficult to get a good night of sleep, we compound the weight problem.

And if this wasn't enough, we insist on treating illness with drugs that are often laced with more chemicals. It's hardly surprising to find a medicine cabinet loaded with drugs used to treat various conditions created by the side effects of the initial drugs that were used to treat the first symptoms.

Aging has nothing to do with counting the years. You can be healthy at 90 or diseased and overweight at 30. It's how you age that's important. The cause of aging starts with changing your lifestyle. In our hustle and bustle world with all the responsibilities we have it's not easy to change that lifestyle.

If you hope to live as long as many of today's centenarians, you must take responsibility for your health before the diseases of age make living a misery.

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