RealAge: Are You as Young as You Can Be?
by Michael F. Roizen

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Summary of RealAge: Are You as Young as You Can Be?

While your chronological age is fixed, your biological age may be years older--or younger--depending on a combination of factors. "RealAge" offers a revolutionary, systematic program that calculates the aging effect of more than 100 different health behaviors--ranging from diet and medication to stress control and chronic smoking--and enables you to assess your own biological age. Most important, it shows you how to design a specific path to improving or reversing your own aging trajectory.

Developed by Dr. Michael F. Roizen, chair of anesthesia and critical care at the University of Chicago and preventive gerontologist, along with four other scientists, the RealAge program is based on cutting-edge scientific research. Dr. Roizen and his team have pored over 25,000 medical studies, evaluating what they tell us about aging and what they tell us about the prevention of aging.In "RealAge," they present the complete results of their analysis for the first time.

Each chapter covers a broad health topic--for example, how the right vitamins and supplements, exercise, or diet can be used to control how your genes affect you--and calculates the RealAge advantage you will gain by adopting a specific behavior. Charts, fact sheets, and tests give you specific choices to make and describe benefits to be gained so you can measure your success.

Suggested behavior changes arerated in order of difficulty so you can decide whether the result is worth the effort.

Ultimately, this program is about maintaining your health. The better condition you are in, the better prepared you will be to fight the factors that age you. "RealAge" demonstrates that you can have more control over the aging process. It makes science simple and its promise is irresistible: You may live as young at seventy as you did at forty-four.

Remeber your high school reunion?

Even though everyone was the same chronological age, people no longer looked the same. Some wore the years well, staying young and exuberant despite the passage of time, whereas others looked as if they had aged ten years more than everyone else--and probably had.

Did you know that:

Financial stress can make your RealAge two to thirty-two years older?

The difference between having the ideal blood pressure 115/76--and high blood pressure--higher than 140/90--can make a RealAge difference of more than twenty years?

A tablet of aspirin a day can make your RealAge 1.9 years younger?

Flossing daily and seeing a dentist and dental hygienist every six months can make your RealAge 6.4 years younger?

In" RealAge" you will discover many other easy-to-institute Age Reduction Strategies that will enable you to live longer and younger.

He's compiled a list of 100 health-related factors, among them tobacco and alcohol use, diet, prescription and over-the-counter drug use, your parents' health, even pet ownership and the highest educational level completed by your spouse, and worked all these into a quiz to determine your "real age." If you've taken your health for granted, be prepared for a shock. He then explains how to follow a personalized age-reduction plan using a range of methods, from quick fixes (use a helmet while bicycling), to moderately easy changes (avoid sun and radon exposure), all the way to the most difficult changes (reduce the stress in your life). Emotional issues are given as much attention as physical ones; Roizen says, for example, that seeing a psychologist to help work through serious personal problems can reduce your chronological age by 8 to 16 years alone.

RealAge may appeal to Fountain of Youth seekers, but will be especially useful for folks who are out of shape and too overwhelmed to start a fitness plan, and for those who are understandably confused by the wealth of contradictory health reports in the news. Dr. Roizen has done an excellent job of organizing and explaining essential health information, from defining health concepts such as blood pressure (and explaining how to lower it) to distilling facts about diet, supplements, and herbs. Far from faddish, RealAge clearly presents only advice that's been proven effective in clinical trials. This is preventive medicine at its best. --Erica Jorgensen

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