WHAT CAN BE FIXED WITH QUANTITATIVE MEDICINE?

You are no doubt thinking: Lifestyle changes may be unpleasant. I like my life now, but I do want peak health.  If I make all of the changes you suggest and fix my numbers, is that really going to modify my health. Will it really increase my longevity and prevent degenerative disease?

The somewhat hand-waving answer is: statistically – it definitely will. Results will vary depending on four things:

• Your personal genetic luck.
• How old you were when you started the program.
• How much trouble you were in when you started.
• Your degree of adherence.

If you started young, knew what to measure and what to change, and thoroughly complied, that long disease free life becomes almost a sure thing. Some of the people in my practice were quite sick. The vast majority of these people extricated themselves from various danger zones quite quickly and they are on their way to permanent long lasting health. I am not sure about compliance, but backsliding is more common than I would wish. I suspect most of those that made less progress, and here I am talking about 10% to 20%, were not following the various protocols. It’s not always easy to do so.

To be more specific, for the compliant, about 90% of the time, the lifestyle modifications that Quantitative Medicine will suggest will change the numbers, and that will change the disease risk. There will be some stubborn cases and other lines of attack will be necessary, but for most, disease risk will be greatly reduced and disease free life extended. More to the point, most people will experience these benefits:

• Elevated HDL2b and reduced cortisol will significantly reduce the risk of cancer.
• Driving down glucose, insulin, and triglycerides, is, almost by definition, a cure for adult onset diabetes. Driving down these same three will likely prevent the emergence of any dementias.
• Elevated HDL2b and effective management of triglycerides will slowly bring down plaque buildup and greatly reduce the risk of arterial disease. It can even reverse it.
• Doing resistance exercise which involves big bones will prevent and reverse osteoporosis. If there is already loss of stature it may partially reverse that too.
• Mental acuity and memory will improve.
• Quality of sleep will improve.
• Sense of well-being will improve.
• You will look younger, possibly a lot younger.
• In a medical sense, you will be younger.

Here is a list of what usually doesn’t work, although some have reported an effect:

• Hair will not return to its original color, nor start growing again where it once grew. A few have reported hair regrowth; there is a reasonable mechanism for this to be true but it is the exception rather than the rule.
• Hearing loss will not improve.

I have arbitrarily divided lifestyle into eating, exercise, de-stressing, and sleep. In future posts, I will describe the specific effects that changes in each of these will likely have on the key numbers and health. The idea is to choose modifications that suit your style, convictions, and likely compliance. Then you can try them out, measure again, and if necessary, modify further. A lifestyle modification that improves health and longevity should not be a form of self-torture.

BIOLOGICAL AGE

Anyone that has been to a 40th or 50th high school reunion has seen the spread. Some seem fit as a fiddle, energetic, happy, etc., while others are not doing well at all. This is always a cause for reflection and chatter, and is usually put down to genetics, or some other rationale. For almost the entire ‘class’ the rate of aging reflects how close they stayed to idea homeostasis and anabolism in that last 40 or 50 years, and has little to do with genetics. If you were to get a blood sample for each of the reunion attendees, you could plot everyone’s ‘biological’ age quite accurately. (Would certainly make for a memorable reunion, though you wouldn’t likely be invited back.)

Here is what you would find though: Those with numbers in the ideal ranges, the ‘A’ students, would have a biological age 10-15 younger than their chronological age and the ‘C’ students, 10-15 years older. In a health sense, there is a lot more reality to biological age that to chronological age. If your bones are strong, they are strong – you aren’t going to get osteoporosis even if you are 150. Chronological age doesn’t matter. Same with arterial plaque.

Beyond a certain age, people stop looking forward to birthdays. (Not really, they merely stop looking forward to being one year older.) Anyway, Quantitative Medicine gives you a way to beat the clock, or at least slow it down.