Fountain of Youth series: Superfoods

What Supplements Should I be taking to slow aging? 

  This has recently become one of the most common questions to show up in my email, and it's a valid one indeed.  With all the constant flip-flopping by medical researchers, and the heavy marketing by supplement retailers, along with the dozens of new products on the shelves every month, all screaming:  "Take This If You Want To Live!"...
  It's nearly impossible for us to browse the growing inventory of vitamins and such at the local pharmacy or superstore and make a valid and conscientious choice.

   So, what are the best anti-aging supplements?
   There are many, such as CoQ10, that have a tremendous amount of clinical evidence backing up their use as anti-aging supplements. However, I'm not a fan of taking supplements in their isolated form.
 I'd rather get these compounds and phytonutrients straight from nature, in whole food forms. So, when it comes to getting these anti-aging compounds into your body, the best source is to turn to these whole foods as they are found in nature: Superfoods.

  I frequently mention superfoods in these writings, and there's a good reason for it. They contain an vast number of health-enhancing phytonutrients.
 Today's scientists and doctors don't even have a clue as to how many phytonutrients might be present in a superfood like chlorella or spirulina, much less having a grasp on how those phytonutrients impact the human body.
 But the point is, you don't need to have an ingredients list of what is in a superfood in order to benefit from it. Your body knows what to do with it once you ingest it. If you trust your body and the wisdom of nature -- and recognize the nutritional benefits of consuming high-density food sources -- you will gain the benefits, regardless of your level of understanding of their nutritional composition.

  The very best superfoods to consume in terms of longevity are chlorella, spirulina, sea vegetables (such as seaweed and blue-green algae), broccoli sprouts (or any sprouts, for that matter), quinoa, and soy products like tofu or soymilk.

 Taken together, these products provide tens of thousands of compounds that are beneficial to human health. Perhaps in another 100 years, these compounds will be identified, studied and proven to be extremely helpful to human health, but in the meantime, they remain mystery compounds that are outside the understanding of modern medical researchers.
But there's something interesting in all this: these are the superfoods that I recommend people eat anyway, regardless of whether they're interested in longevity or pursuing the fountain of youth.

  In other words, there's really nothing special you need to do to pursue an anti-aging program that you aren't already pursuing just by being healthy in the first place.
 A healthy human individual is automatically on an anti-aging program, which is why they live longer. Sort of makes sense, doesn't it?

 Conversely, most Americans and people in other so-called civilized nations are actually pursuing an accelerated aging program.
  If you want to accelerate your aging process, and shorten your life, the way to do that is to do what most Americans are doing already: avoid physical exercise, commit a major portion of your diet to fast foods and junk foods, consume large quantities of white flour and refined white sugar, eat brand-name groceries sold in beautiful boxes and made with dirt-cheap ingredients that lack any nutritional content whatsoever, and of course, avoid supplementing with superfoods and other nutritional supplements.

  It can also be claimed and backed up that the consumption of prescription drugs is an aging acceleration strategy as well. Prescription drugs, due to their toxicity, cause premature aging of the liver, the pancreas, the kidneys, and other important organs, which eventually leads to the premature death of people taking those drugs.
 So, when it comes to anti-aging strategies, avoiding prescription drugs certainly belongs near the very top of the list.

  There's one more important consideration here when it comes to anti-aging strategies, and that's strength training. Given all of the documented benefits of human growth hormone -- and there are many -- it's no surprise that people are attempting to get more human growth hormone into their bodies through injections.
 However, you don't necessarily need injections to boost your levels of HGH. One of the best ways to boost your levels is to engage in strength training, and the larger your muscles you train, the more HGH your body produces.

  For example, if you strength train your gluts and hamstrings by practicing some squats, your body, over the next 24 to 48 hours, will produce much higher levels of HGH naturally. And HGH is only one of the chemicals your body produces in response to strength training.
  It could be said that for every hour you work out, your body manufactures $10,000 worth of beneficial chemical compounds -- that is, it would cost $10,000 if you had to have them manufactured somewhere else and injected into your body.

  But by strength training, your body manufactures these on its own -- no needles required, no visits to the anti-aging clinic, and of course, no risk of having some artificial substance injected into your bloodstream. You just get the anti-aging medicine nature intends -- straight from your body.

  And that's my last bit of advice when it comes to longevity: engage in regular strength training. Strength training will boost your bone mass density, it will enhance your mood and brain function, it will increase the oxygenation of organs and tissues throughout your body, and, of course, it will reduce your body fat and increase your lean body mass.

  These are precisely the same benefits that are being attributed to HGH injections, and yet you can achieve all of these simply by engaging in regular strength training. That's not to say that HGH injections don't work -- I'm actually a supporter of anti-aging medicine, but I believe that most people would do better by pursuing anti-aging lifestyle changes on their own before looking to clinics or other anti-aging companies to solve their aging problems for them.

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