The Seven Golden Rules of Health
Interested in adding 35 years of high quality living to your lifespan? Here's how, and here's WOW!
While working as a health educator for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas in 1977, Rajjpuut read about a recently-completed long-range study of vigorous older people. The gist of it all came to this: the University of California extracted seven lifestyle practices that these hardy senior citizens tended to share as a group. As for the study results, here's what those salubrious old folks had in common:
The Seven Rules
1. Eat a very large healthy breakfast daily
2. Regularly eat 3-4 smaller meals daily
3. Maintain a healthy normal weight
4. Avoid tobacco and drug use (and minimize over-the-counter remedies)
5. Drink alcohol extremely moderately
6. Sleep 7-8 hours nightly
7. Practice regular vigorous exercise
The "magic" from the study came when UC extrapolated their finding out into the general populace. They discovered that if they took two men, one aged 55 years old and the other 20 and compared their lifestyles . . . if the 20 year old practiced 0-1 of the "Seven Golden Rules" and the 55 year old practiced 6-7 of them: the two men had the exact same life expectancy. That is, it would be absolutely no surprise at all if they both dropped dead on the same day, say 28.2 years in the future according to the actuarial statistics of the day. Not sure what that means to you, but the nature of those initial 35 years difference between the two men is Rajjpuut's personal definition of "quality of life."
Further studies by other groups have shown that when it comes to changes made before age 42, once the individual starts to practice the Seven Golden Rules . . . within eight years most of the harm from the prior twenty years of a dissipate lifestyle is gone. That means, for example, quit smoking and follow the seven golden rules for eight years, and it's almost as if you've never smoked a day in your life. Benefits from lifestyle changes after age 42, were much less consistent but still quite significant.
A few comments are in order. Buckling seatbelts was a fairly new idea at the time of the study. If an eighth and ninth golden rule are needed which Rajjpuut would add from his experience as a health educator, they would be:
8. Buckle-up in moving vehicles and always observe proper caution around machinery
9. Avoid highly processed foods and fried foods and eat some high-fiber food daily
Rule #5 "Drink alcohol extremely moderately" deserves some discussion. After a brief flirtation with boozing as a youngster, Rajjpuut rarely consumes a six-pack a month these days, so that's what he practices and preaches. However, in the actual study the amount of liquor mentioned was "averaging one beer or glass of wine per day." Over the years since the study, much has been made of the value of red wine in the diet. All this implies that a little bit of alcohol is preferable to none at all. If there is one area of the study that Rajjpuut would put in question it would be that conclusion.
Here's his "take" on the matter. The trouble with saying that teetotalers are less healthy than extremely moderate drinkers comes in two areas: A) a whole lot of teetotalers are reformed alcoholics who in many cases regrettably did great damage to their health prior to quitting drinking altogether and presumably shortened their probable lifespans in the process. It is his intuition that IF the study had eliminated this effect from former alcoholics in its study, their fifth rule should have been: "Rule #5 "Drink alcohol extremely moderately or not at all." Additionally, from his experience Rajjpuut suspects that there are "overly pious personalities" out there who don't drink and resent everybody in the world who does . . . and in fact they deeply resent almost everybody in the world for any number of reasons. If they were removed from the rolls of non-drinkers, I'm sure the non-drinkers would have averaged a longer life also. So the last addition to the Golden Rules of Health is:
Rule #6 7/8 Have a sense of humor, relax
If on top of all this great advice, the individual, let us call him "Bill" takes charge of his own health and finds a health-conscious (rather than disease-oriented) doctor "muy simpatico" who believes that the purpose of wise medicine is to keep people hale-healthy and out of his office . . . and if Bill always seeks at least a second opinion in considering serious health care matters, then he and his doctors are part of the solution to the health care mess rather than part of problem. If every company had a full roster of employees like Bill then health care costs and costs across the board would drop markedly starting now.