Preventing Illness & Living Longer

January 23, 2012

Interview with Dr. David Agus, author of the book The End of Illness

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Mike Carruthers:
We can all do a lot to prevent of postpone serious illness.

Dr. David Agus:
My hope is, and what I really believe can happen is, we can delay illness to the 9th or 10th decade. You know the 1950tys were the last years in the United States you can die of old age on a death certificate – I want to bring that back.
 

Dr. David Agus, Professor of Medicine at USC and author of the book The End of Illness, says it’s important to understand that…

The root cause of things like cancer, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases of the brain is inflammation. And so we want to design your life to prevent and reduce inflammation. So things as simple as wearing good shoes makes a big difference – you wear those fancy Italian loafers think of the pressure in your joints all day versus walking in a running shoe with a cushioned sole.

And the regularity of your daily schedule plays a role.

You have your lunch today at noon and tomorrow at 2 o’clock that’s a lot of stress on the body. Because all those stress hormones go up until you eat so the more regular you can make your schedule the better.

The research to support this is pretty convincing.

If you look at the data it’s very clear, when a spouse dies – the spouse that’s still alive they have a much increased risk of death over the next 6 months, because their schedule gets dramatically irregular when they lose their spouse. In the Framingham heart study one of our biggest studies to look at risk factors owning a dog was very protective because a dog puts you on a regular schedule.
 

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here