7 Health Superchargers
These foods, exercises, supplements, and drugs help you live longer and look good doing it. Check out the list.
1. Keep Testosterone Levels High
Low T is associated with a higher death rate. It also makes you fat. You know that testosterone plays a role in muscle size and strength, libido, energy, and keeping body fat low, but high testosterone is also important to just plain staying alive.
Low testosterone levels correlate strongly with:
- Higher risk of cardiovascular disease
- Narrowing of carotid arteries
- Abnormal EKG
- More frequent congestive heart failure
- Increased incidence of angina
- Increased body mass index
- Type II diabetes
- Metabolic syndrome
- Insulin resistance
- Higher death rate from all causes, including cardiac mortality
Notice the last item. One study of 858 veterans found that those with low T had an 88 percent greater chance of dying, for any reason, even after variables like age, other illnesses, and body mass index were accounted for.
Are you immune to low testosterone because you're a lifter? Nope. Male athletes often have lower testosterone than untrained men. One study found that lifters (along with rowers, cyclists, and swimmers) had testosterone levels that were 60-85 percent of untrained men. This might have something to do with an exercise-related increase in steroid hormone binding globulin (SHBG), which makes less testosterone available to tissues.
Low testosterone levels seem to be epidemic among lifters. True, T levels usually go up after an intense workout, but the rise is short-lived and levels often drop to below baseline soon after. So, keep testosterone high. Use science-backed testosterone boosters (like Omega-Man (Buy at Amazon)). If your levels are seriously deficient, consider physician monitored TRT.
2. Keep Estrogen in Check
High estrogen can increase degenerative diseases and early death. Consider the big estrogen study reported in JAMA.
Researchers monitored the estrogen levels of a large group of men. They found that men with estradiol (a form of estrogen) in the normal range between 21.80 and 30.11 pg/ml had the fewest deaths during a three-year period. Men with the highest levels (above 37.99 pg/ml) had 133 percent more deaths during the same period. However, men with the lowest estrogen levels (below 12.90) fared the worst as they suffered 317 percent more deaths!
What some doctors took away from this was that men need estrogen, so they don't want to give patients anything to lower estrogen. In other words, many doctors ignored the far more prevalent problem of high estrogen and as such are loathe to prescribe anti-estrogen medications. The problem? Once estrogen levels rise, the risk of degenerative diseases climbs. Atherosclerosis goes up, as does the risk of stroke. Prostates grow. The risk of flat-out dying in general goes up.
If you're an athlete, higher levels of estrogen also affect your ability to build strength or grow muscle, and it also makes it harder to get lean. Clearly, estrogen needs to be kept in check. Consider natural estrogen-fighting supplements such as Rez-V (Buy at Amazon) or, if the problem is severe, consult with a progressive doctor and get on an estrogen-lowering drug like Arimidex.
3. Take Curcumin Every Day
Curcumin is a powerful anti-inflammatory but its other effects range from pain management to benefits that affect nearly every organ system in the body. Curcumin can:
- Enhance cardiovascular health
- Reduce body fat
- Support healthy cholesterol
- Alleviate cognitive decline
- Act as an anti-aromatase (thus increasing testosterone)
- Reduce plaque levels in arteries
- Reduce the risk of diabetes
Always use the micellar form of curcumin (Buy at Amazon) which delivers 95 times more active curcumin into the bloodstream than formulas containing piperine.
4. Moderate Your Antioxidant Intake
Too many antioxidants may do more harm than good. Yes, limiting the production of free radicals is a good thing, to a point. The problem is one of dosage, incorrect timing, the wrong antioxidants, or too much. If you completely turn off free radical leakage through antioxidants, the membrane potential of the mitochondria collapse and cell-dissolving proteins are spilled into the cell. If a bunch of mitochondria do this, the cell dies. If a bunch of cells do this, organ health and overall health can suffer.
Free radicals are actually important to health because, in addition to telling the cell when or when not to commit suicide, they also fine-tune cellular respiration, otherwise known as the production of ATP (the energy currency of the cell). ATP is essential to existence. Monkey around with it too much through the use of antioxidants and the center can't hold. You might not feel any different, but on a cellular level, you might be self-destructing.
You should still ingest antioxidants, but probably not individual antioxidants in pill form. What nutritional science did was cherry-pick individual antioxidants and mega-dose on them, assuming they act alone instead of in concert with hundreds of other antioxidants.
This is why you may see reports that too much vitamin E or C can cause serious health problems. Consider a sprig of thyme. It contains 30 different antioxidants. Isn't it possible that their alleged benefits are obtained when ingesting all of them together, rather than cherry-picking one or two?
Therefore, it's prudent to get your antioxidants in whole fruit and vegetable form, or consider a freeze-dried fruit and vegetable antioxidant formula such as Biotest Superfood (Buy at Amazon) that contains thousands of antioxidants, along with countless phytochemicals in general. That way, you likely get the correct amount of free-radical control – enough to prevent premature aging or deterioration, but not so much that it promotes cell suicide.
5. Do Sprints
Sprinting will make you look hot and enhance mitochondrial health and performance. Here's a breakdown of the benefits:
- Preferentially burns body fat, increasing post-exercise fat oxidations by 75%.
- Builds muscle in the legs and trunk.
- Builds muscle in women (protein synthesis is up 222% in women after sprinting, as opposed to 43% in men).
- Improves insulin sensitivity.
It also enhances mitochondrial health and performance. Intense exercise increases the number of mitochondria in the cell, which is good for performance and overall systemic health (as the number of mitochondria correlates strongly with performance, heart health, prostate health, liver health, etc.).
6. Drink Coffee
Have 3-4 cups per day, regular or decaf, and you might live longer. Coffee is a little mysterious in that we're not sure how it does some of the things it does. One thing seems certain, though: the more you drink, the better off you are. In fact, the more you drink, the longer you live.
In one mortality study of 400,000 people, coffee drinkers had between 6 and 16 percent fewer deaths. In another study, coffee drinkers were 24 percent less likely to die during a 19-year follow-up.
The sweet spot seems to be three to four cups a day, but one study involving six cups a day saw a 33 percent reduction in diabetes diagnoses. Other maladies positively affected by coffee include liver cancers, fatty livers, alcoholic liver disease, heart disease, stroke, depression, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's.
7. Take Aspirin
Aspirin can help control free radicals, improve health, extend lifespan, and potentially even burn fat.
You know about aspirin and heart attacks. Sure, for people over 50, taking a baby aspirin (83 mg.) a day leads to a 22% reduction in heart attacks and anywhere from a 25% to an 80% reduction in strokes. Likewise, there's evidence that taking a baby aspirin every day leads to a substantial reduction in colon cancer.
But those might not be the best reasons to take aspirin. Aspirin is a mild respiratory uncoupler. Uncoupling is a cellular process that enables a constant flow of electrons down the respiratory chain (i.e., ATP production) in the energy-producing mitochondria. This process restricts (but doesn't shut off) the flow of free radicals, thus theoretically improving health, extending lifespan, and even burning fat.
Shutting off free radical production entirely, as you might do when "overdosing" on antioxidants, might cause the cell to die, which is against the whole point of taking antioxidants. So, respiratory uncoupling, as accomplished by aspirin, is good. Consider taking one baby aspirin a day – two a day if you're a big guy – but be aware that aspirin can cause gastrointestinal bleeding in a small percentage of the population.