I took myself to London this weekend for a workshop with Patrick Holford. I’ve seen him present before and am signed up to his newsletter. As a result my interest was piqued when I saw that he was doing his last tour on Healthy Aging.<\/p>\n
His presentation was sold as being for Practitioners only, I felt a bit cheeky signing up but once I was there over a quarter in the room were people with no nutritional qualifications or merely an interest in living a longer life, which made me feel a bit less of a fraud!<\/p>\n
In summary the day was very interesting, if you want to live a long, healthy life and die of old age and not in pain, having been immobile for the previous 6 years then start doing something about it now! Don’t wait!<\/strong> Life is fast and waiting until you’re ill is too damn late.<\/p>\n So you want to know what the steps to ‘healthy aging’ are?<\/p>\n 1. Stay smart and avoid Alzheimer’s disease (you can and if caught in the early stages you can retard the decline)<\/p>\n 2. Keep your joints mobile (avoid arthritis — you can and you can reverse it)<\/p>\n 3. Stay lean (obesity related disease is the biggest killer)<\/p>\n 4. Sleep well and reduce stress (stress is the biggest cause of heart disease, remember stress comes in many forms, it’s not just your annoying boss)<\/p>\n 5. Keep your skin youthful (the power of vitamin A, good oils and vitamin C)<\/p>\n 6. Say no to cancer (by doing all the above, the risk can be diminished and it can be reversed, eat lots of anti-oxidant rich foods)<\/p>\n 7. Keep your heart healthy (be careful of taking statins ‘just in case’ — there is no need if you do all of the above. But if you absolutely do have to you must take 90mg CoQ10 a day minimum to protect your heart function)<\/p>\n 8. Protect your eyesight (using good fats and fish oils and not using a computer all day long)<\/p>\n 9. Look after your hormones – (avoid HRT but consider natural ways to boost your levels. This goes for men and women. Low testosterone levels are terrible for men too.)<\/p>\n Easy eh? Well you’d think that with all those qualified nutritionists in the room they’d be doing this wouldn’t you?! Well think again! At one point Patrick asked us to put our hands up if we thought we had a healthy diet. Of course, 90% of the room put their hands up. He then showed a slide and said, ‘who had at least one of these 4 combinations of foods yesterday?’. It was a slide with 4 examples of fruits and veggies on it. Only 10% of that larger group did (smug note — I was one of them!) — so just like all professions you can’t always expect those who are qualified to do it to do it properly for themselves.<\/p>\n Personal trainers aren’t always fit. Hair dressers don’t have the best hair. IT guys don’t have the best back up system and shock horror nutritionists don’t eat a healthy diet!<\/p>\n Finally, I wanted a memento of this last speaking tour of his and also something that would be useful to you. So I asked him if he would kindly do a short video on why we need to supplement. He said yes and this is the result —-> enjoy!
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