Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #1 in Books
- Published on: 2007-10-30
- Released on: 2007-10-30
- Binding: Hardcover
- 432 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In their newest in the You series, physicians Oz and Roizen and a supporting cast of contributors explain why the body ages and how readers can become anatomical puppeteers, mastering their genes, bad habits, environmental pollution and stress while igniting the body's ability to stay fit, strong and healthy. According to the authors, avoiding such major causes of death as cancer and heart disease increases life expectancy by only just under a decade. With their talent for creating vivid, humorous images (amplified by cartoon drawings), they describe 14 major agers and how readers can use what is known about telomeres (which look like the plastic ends of shoelaces), mitochondria (the body's energy powerhouses) and other components of body functioning to repair and rejuvenate cells. While the hefty amount of detailed information might seem overwhelming, the suggestions in the authors' tool box are straightforward and, frequently, simple: walking a half hour each day; consistently getting enough sleep; relieving stress with yoga, meditation and chi gong; removing toxins from the home; and avoiding accidents, for example. Perhaps most simple—and surprising—is their claim that one of the best predictors of aging is your perception of your own health. With the facts and tools laid out here, readers will be able to articulate, challenge and change those perceptions through positive action. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
Develop a Memorable Memory
Our brains sure do have a way of messing with our minds.
One moment, you can be spitting out the names of your entire third-grade class, the batting statistics from the 1974 St. Louis Cardinals, the color dress you wore to the eighth-grade Sadie Hawkins Day dance, or the entire script from your favorite Seinfeld episode. The next minute, you space on the name of your cat.
Call them what you want -- senior moments, doomsday to dementia -- but the truth is that we all experience these neurological hiccups as we age. And we all wonder exactly what they mean. Some of us write them off to stress, fatigue, or some kind of neurological overload that's caused by the ogre who signs our paychecks, while others worry about whether a moment of forgetfulness means that we have a first-class ticket on the express train to Alzheimer's.
No matter what we may think causes our decline in mental acuity, most people share a pretty big assumption about our gray matter: Either our brains are genetically determined to be Ginsu sharp for the duration, or we're eventually going to live life putting on our underwear last. That is, we believe that our genes, the very first Major Ager, completely control our neurological destiny.
That simply isn't true.
While many diseases and conditions have genetic elements to them, memory conditions have some of the strongest genetic indicators. For example, a PET (positron-emission tomography) scan, which records images of the brain as it functions, reveals evidence of early Alzheimer's when it identifies that the brain is misusing energy. This abnormality is caused by illness of the mitochondria (more details on this Major Ager on page 48), which is genetically determined. But the truth is that even if your genes have decided to give you a life of serious forgetfulness, you do have the ability to control those genes so your mind is strong, your brain functions at full power, and you remember everything from the crucial details of your life to whether or not you turned off the oven -- even when your birthday candles reach triple digits. Plus, we have lots of data from twin studies saying that less than 50 percent of memory is inherited, meaning that if you get a head start on the action steps we're going to cover, you can alter how your genes are expressed. In the end, genetics loads the gun, but your lifestyle pulls the trigger.
Clearly, the brain is the most complex organ in your body. In fact, if the brain were simpler, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand it. But we are. Think of your brain as the city's electrical grid. Your brain's nerve cells, or neurons, are constantly firing and receiving messages in much the same way that power plants send signals and homes and businesses receive them. Power may originate from a main source, but the connections then branch out every which way throughout the city. Your brain functions the same way: Messages are sent from one neuron to another across your neurological grid. When those neurons successfully communicate with one another through the sending and receiving of neurological impulses, your brain can file away your memories.
But what happens when a storm, an accident, or a chainsaw-wielding hoodlum knocks out the power lines? You lose connections, so you lose power -- maybe to a particular neighborhood or maybe to a large segment of the city, depending on which ones got fried. Same goes for your brain. If something knocks out those neural connections, then small or large parts of your brain can experience a blackout, and you freak because you can't remember that you left the car keys on the back of the toilet.
Certainly, many things can cause malfunctions in your neurological grid. Some are acute and immediate, like a concussion arising from a brain bruise. Others are more chronic, as in the case of a genetic malfunction that can cause your power lines to be rickety so they easily fritz out. These are the ones that we're mainly going to address here.
Your Memory: Don't Fuggedaboudit
Part of our job as doctors is to tell you things straight up, because when we don't tell the truth, people get hurt. No sugarcoating. No BS (that really stands for no bad science). No "Win One for the Gipper" speeches. When it comes to your brain, here's a fact that's harsher than a Buffalo winter: The research shows that, eventually, everyone in America will either get Alzheimer's or care for someone who has it.
In some way or another, we're all going to be affected by serious change-your-life memory problems. But the Gipper side of that statistic is this: Memory disorders aren't as uncontrollable as they seem, and the way to attack potential brain problems is by using your brain to understand them. For starters, here are some things you should know about your noggin:
- We actually experience a mental decline a lot earlier than we realize. Memory loss starts at age sixteen and is relatively common by forty. One way you can see this is through research done on video game players. People start losing their hand-eye coordination and the ability to perform exceptionally well on video games after the age of twenty-five. The fascinating part of this research isn't that you'll rarely beat your kid in Mario Kart: Double Dash; it's that even if your brain knows what to do when presented with an animated hairpin turn at 135 mph, your brain can't fire those messages fast enough to your trigger-happy thumbs. There's a natural slowing of the connection -- the power line -- between your brain and your body.
- Men and women not only differ when it comes to movie tastes and erogenous zones, but also differ when it comes to mental decline. Men usually lose their ability to solve complex problems as they age, while women often lose their ability to process information quickly. That split shows us a couple of things. One, that there's certainly a strong genetic component to memory loss. And, two, that there are specific actions you should be taking to combat that genetic disposition. While there are some places where you're naturally going to decline because of your sex, there are other areas where you're going to have an advantage. That means your job isn't only to try to rebuild the area that's breaking down but to preserve the areas that excel. But across the board, both genders lose competency in the areas in which they are weak to begin with. So women lose spatial cognition, and men suffer verbal losses. Though it's certainly not true for everyone, it may give you clues as to what areas of your brain to concentrate on as you age -- or it may help you play to your strengths. (Those with poor memory recall can use organizational skills to compensate, for example.)
- You don't have to have an elite brain to know that your three-pound organ has more power than a rocket booster. It controls everything from your emotions to your decision making, and it gives you the ability to understand why the baseball in Figure 11.1 on page 220 is pretty darn funny. But when we discuss memory loss, we're essentially focusing on three specific brain functions: sensory information (your ability to determine what information is important), short-term memory loss (quick, what's the title of this chapter?), and long-term memory loss (that's your bank of recipes, trivia, names, and every piece of information you've known, read, and stored during your life).
Whether you've seen it on the news, on TV shows, or within your own family, you know how dementia looks from the outside: People forget faces, names, where they live, and information that seems -- to the rest of the world -- so easy to remember. The most frequently seen problem: getting lost on a walk home. To really control your own genetic destiny, you need to take a look at what memory loss looks like on the inside. For the record, age-related memory loss is classified in several ways. Conditions such as Alzheimer's, dementia, and mild cognitive impairment are all technically different. For our purposes, we're tackling them all together as age-related memory problems because of the similarities in how they change people's lives.
Your Brain: Mind and Matter
Before we crack some skulls and dive inside the brain, let's quickly look at what memory really is: Essentially, it's the process of learning information, storing it, and then having the ability to recall it when you need it -- whether to solve problems, tell stories, or save yourself on the witness stand.
Learning begins with those power connections in your brain: neurons firing messages to one another. Your ability to process information is determined by the junctions between those neurons, called the synapses. The ability of brain cells to speak to one another is strengthened or weakened as you use them. We'll spare you all the biological miracles that take place between your ears, but essentially, the more you use those synapses, the stronger they get and the more they proliferate. That's why you may have strong neural pathways for your family history or weak ones for eighties music trivia. That also gives you a little insight into how you remember things. If something's exciting to you, then you learn it faster -- and train those synapses to make strong connections. But if the information seems more boring than the sexual habits of an earthworm, you can still learn and build those connections with repeated use.
Problems arise when synapses lie dormant: The less you use certain connections, the greater chance they have of falling into disrepair (like losing fluency in a foreign language if you don't use it for a long time). Technically, we actually learn by weakening underutilized synapses and repairing and strengthening the synapses we commonly use. So if you cook a lot and enjoy it, you'll eventually know the recipes by heart -- and learn them faster because it's enjoyable. You build a large connecting wire, which allows for the...
Customer Reviews
YOUseful Information.
This is a neat book and must be a good inch and a half thick! It is divided up into two parts.
The theme of Part I is why you age and how you stay young. This section makes up roughly three quarters of the book. It deals mainly with what the book calls the "major agers." Examples of these include short telomeres, toxins, and ultraviolet radiation.
Part II is the plan to extend your warranty. Here you have a list of daily things to do which include such things as flossing, meditating, walking for 30 minutes a day, and getting the right amount of sleep.
Then there's a 14-day plan to help get you started- after that you should pretty much be on the right track. This section gives day-to-day advice and includes things for you to do for your mind AND body, things such as "do something as a family" that day, or "do the Chi-gong workout" today. Diet and exercise advice is also covered substantially in this section. Exercise consists of a YOU2 Workout (made up mainly of a series of stretches) and a Chi-gong Workout- both detailed step-by-step with exercising elves. Also need to mention they require no special equipment-nice!
All-in-all it's well worth the read, and for me, it's strength lies in it's vast amount of knowledge it offers on the aging processes of the human body. Packed with the stereotypical YOU tips, quizzes, factoids, and cartoons, most readers will benefit greatly. Also recommend "Treat Your Own Rotator Cuff" for readers who want to extend the life of their rotator cuff or have a shoulder problem that keeps them from exercising. Happy reading!
I have recently reviewed another book that deals with the subject of aging, titled "Can We Live 150". I was very much inspired by it so naturally I went to the book store today to see what the YOU doctors have to say about aging.
First thing I noticed is the price difference. While Amazon price is not much different: ($[...] for "Can We Live 150", versus $[...] for "You: Staying Young" ) I did not realize that up until now, and I paid the full price of $[...] in my bookstore (Buyer beware!) "You: Staying Young" is over 400 pages thick but with plenty of wasted space, cartoons, etc. However, it is a hardcover edition, so if you do prefer hardcovers than you wouldn't mind spending extra few bucks for that.
The other striking difference is the language. While Dr. Tombak, the author of "Can We Live..." writes in simple layman language, doctors Roizen and Oz could not avoid using scientific doctors' language. On the other hand the book is packed with all kinds of cartoons, that makes it look rather childish and it absolutely doesn't fit the language being used. Is this a book for seniors or for children?
What I liked in this book is the first part dedicated to "Major Agers" such as genes, oxidation, toxins, sugar, overeating, hormones, UV radiation, etc. This part, consisting of about 300 pages scientifically discusses all the aging factors, and the ways of dealing with them. UV radiation is named as the "major ager", so please keep that in mind the next time you head for the beach. On the other hand the authors also point out the many benefits of sun radiation. As usual, moderation is the answer...
Not to be missed is Chapter 16, titled "The Fourteen Day You Extend Warranty Plan". It starts with the following "Daily YOU-Do List":
1. Walk thirty minutes
2. "Floss and brush the teeth that you wish to keep"
3. Take your pills (Omega-3s, vitamins, calcium supplements, aspirin, etc)
4. Sleep 7-8 hours
5. Meditate for 5 minutes
Is that all? I would never suspect it is THAT simple...
Another chapter that I liked is Chapter 12 titled "Live the Sexy Life". Wow, say that to me again! Yes, sex (love) is important for your wellbeing and keeping young. Grab the book for the explicit details...
I gave both books only 4 stars. Does it mean I didn't like them? No, I think they are both great sources of information - each one presented with a different approach - but there is some room for improvement in both cases. So which one should you get? Read the reviews and decide for yourself. I ended up having both of them and I don't regret it, as I think they really complement each other.
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