It seems as though every week we learn something new about the real power of nutrition. Recently, Agricultural Research Service (ARS) funded scientists at the Laboratory for Nutrition and Vision Research and found some interesting information.
Age related macular degeneration (AMD) and the vision loss associated with it may be connected to the “quality” of carbohydrates.

One study showed that a regular consumption of a “slow carb” ( low glycemic index) diet provided a protective effect against macular degeneration. A food’s glycemic index is an indicator of how fast the carbohydrate it contains will spike blood sugar levels.

So how do you keep your glycemic index in check? To learn more about which carbs produce only small fluctuations in our blood glucose and insulin levels, check out http://www.glycemicindex.com/ and follow their recommendations:

1. Pile half your dinner plate high with vegetables or salad
Aim to eat at least five serves of vegetables (this doesn’t include the starchy ones like potatoes, sweet potatoes or sweet corn) every day, and aim for foods with a variety of of colors.

2. Cut back on most potatoes
If you are a big potato eater and can’t bear the thought of giving them up, you don’t have to. Just cut back on the quantity. Don’t be afraid of trying other starchy vegetables like sweet potato, yams or taro, steamed, roasted or mashed.

3. Swap your bread
Choose a really grainy bread where you can actually see the grains, granary bread, stoneground wholemeal bread, real sourdough bread, soy and linseed bread, pumpernickel, fruit loaf or bread made from chickpea or other legume based flours.

4. Replace those high GI crunchy breakfast flakes
These refined breakfast cereals spike your blood glucose and insulin levels. Replace them with smart carbs like natural muesli or traditional (not instant) porridge oats or one of the lower GI processed breakfast cereals that will trickle fuel into your engine.

5. Make your starchy staples the low GI ones
Look for the low GI rice’s, serve your pasta al dente, choose less processed foods such as large flake or rolled oats for porridge or muesli and intact grains such as barley, buckwheat, bulgur, quinoa, whole kernel rye, or whole wheat kernels and opt for lower GI starchy vegetables.

6. Learn to love legumes!
Include legumes like beans, lentils and chickpeas in your meals two or three times a week, more often if you are vegetarian. Add chickpeas to a stir fry, red kidney beans to a chili, a bean salad to that barbecue menu, and beans or lentils to a casserole or soup.

7. Develop the art of combining
No need to cut out all high GI carbs. The trick is to combine them with those low GI tricklers to achieve a moderate overall GI. How? Lentils with rice (think of that delicious classic Italian soup), rice with beans and chili, tabbouli tucked into pita bread (with falafels and a dash of hummus), baked beans on toast or piled on a jacket-baked potato for classic comfort food.

8. Incorporate a lean protein source with every meal
Eat lean meat, skinless chicken, fish and seafood, eggs, milk, yoghurt or cheese, or legumes and tofu if you are vegetarian. The protein portion should make up around a quarter of the plate/meal.

9. Tickle your taste buds
Try vinaigrette (using vinegar or lemon juice with a dash of extra virgin olive oil) with salads, yogurt with cereal, lemon juice on vegetables like asparagus, or sourdough bread. These foods contain acids, which slow stomach emptying and lower your blood glucose response to the carbs in the meal.

10. Go low GI when snacking

If it is healthful and low GI, keep it handy. Grab fresh fruit, dried fruit, or fruit and nut mix, low fat milk and yogurt (or soy alternatives), fruit bread etc for snacks. Limit (this means don’t buy them every week) high GI refined flour products whether home baked or from the supermarket such as cookies, cakes, pastries, crumpets, crackers, biscuits, irrespective of their fat and sugar content. These really are the ‘keep for the occasional treat’ foods.

Keep your eye on the serving size. Remember portion caution with carb rich foods such as rice, al dente pasta and noodles, potatoes etc. Eating a huge amount of these foods, even of the low GI variety, will have a marked effect on your blood glucose. A cup of cooked noodles or al dente pasta or rice plus plenty of mixed non starchy vegetables and a little lean protein can turn into 3 cups of a very satisfying meal.

Most of all, recognize that protective nutrients are in each and every meal that you eat, and we all my have the power to stave off certain age related conditions.

Fitness for life is something many of us would like to think that we have, but how do we measure our own success? If I can run a 5K without experiencing cardiac arrest, does it mean that I’m ‘fit’? Or if I’ve moved on to the advanced yoga class, will this classify me as ‘fit’? Just how do I rank amongst others my age and just what should fitness measure?

To answer these questions, I’ve decided to take the plunge and take the President’s Fitness Challenge Program. As you may remember from Junior High days, The President’ Council of Physical Fitness and Sports focused on youth fitness, seemingly trying to motivate kids towards healthy fitness levels. I remember these tests as being nothing but humiliating, confirming that “jocks” were indeed jocks, and that the non-athletes (me) should just give it up. I shared the same amount of love for physical fitness tests as my love for my starched gym uniform. None.

Fast forward a few years (okay, more than a few) and here I am wondering if my own fitness levels are up to federal standards. Fortunately, the President’s Council has created the first-ever Adult Fitness Test. “What began as a national youth fitness test has grown up. Today, the President’s Challenge takes staying active beyond the school gym and into everyday life.”

The Adult Fitness Test is actually a series of four tests that give one a general measure of fitness in four health related areas: aerobic capacity, muscular strength and endurance, flexibility, and body composition. First, you need to find out if you are healthy enough for testing, easily accomplished via a screening questionnaire. Second, it is recommended that adults find a partner to help collect and record the results for each challenge.

Fortunately, you don’t need to perform the challenges in any particular order or even on the same day. Once you’ve finished, you can record your results online and even get suggestions of ways to improve fitness in that particular area. Each test includes a “FITT” box which recommends Frequency (F), Intensity (I), TIme (T) and Type of exercise (T). Put the four together (FITT) and you get specific ways to improve your level of fitness. You can also compare your results to others and follow your own progress. And no starchy uniforms! What’s not to like?

This June, I’m off to visit www.adultfitnesstest.org and I’m inviting others to join in. Be sure to let us know what you think of the test after completion. Not a bad way to start the summer, eh?

Sheryl Crow gives an inspirational and passionate keynote address about her surviving breast cancer. Her informative and frank keynote took place at an event called Conversations on Health and Wellness October 10, 2009 at the beautiful Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes and was sponsored by Los Angeles Times Magazine.

Sheryl Crow Health and Wellness Keynote-oomphTV.com from oomphTV on Vimeo.

Last month, I was at the gym as usual, trying to kick it up a notch by introducing some interval training. I was really working it, lost in the aura of my ipod (thank you, Rolling Stones), challenging myself for a real run and gun for sixty seconds here and there.

Soon thereafter, an acquaintance asked me if I was doing a new routine and wanted to know why I was pushing myself so hard. I explained that I was turning fifty next month, and I thought I should see how much I could handle, even if only for a very short time. She looked at me, exasperated.

“You’re turning fifty? Wow…you look great. But why are you telling me you’re almost fifty? I mean, no offense, but you really shouldn’t be telling anyone!”

Huh? I shouldn’t? Should I feel shame? (Nope. Don’t feel shame.) Embarrassment? (That’s kind of an odd word to use, isn’t it? Should I feel shocked? (Well okay…yes, the shock factor set in a few months back, but I’ve reached the point of total acceptance.) What should I feel?

One word does it for me: blessed. Each and every year presents new opportunities and new challenges, and as I get to know myself better, I really do feel more respect for who I am and who I’ve become to be. Sure, it feels odd to (physically) be fifty when I really do feel the same as I did when I was much younger. But it is what it is and I’m embracing it with huge, open arms.

The majority of my friends who’ve been turning fifty haven’t thrown a party for themselves. Everyone has celebrated in their own, independent way. Is this because we’re women, and turning fifty is clearly “over the hill”? Or is fifty something that one simply doesn’t celebrate? Is this the time that we really start lying about our age? If so, what are we afraid of?

Are our lives supposed to be so perfect by this time that if they’re not, we’re upset by that? I say bah! Seize it, grab it, celebrate it. I’ve chosen to use the excuse of a birthday to get together with close friends and hike, eat, and enjoy our health and the simplicity of being together. The fact that it’s my birthday is almost coincidental…I’m just marking time.

One thing many of us do, be it a birthday or a new year, is think about where we are and where we’d like to be. The fact that this year will be pivotal in my life (my youngest daughter will head off to college) may, in fact, be even more earth shattering than the birthday itself. Luckily for me, the two circumstances have forced me think long and hard about where I’m headed. And that’s not such a bad thing.

Time will tell if I start to futz about my age. For those of you that do, I’d love to hear from you. For those of you who don’t, I’d love to hear about that too. And hey…. anyone out there taking “advantage” of joining the (yes, I’m saying it) AARP?

Thanks for the birthday wishes.

We profile Alice and Richard Matzkin, a husband and wife team of artists, who explore aging through their art and gain aging acceptance along the way.

The Art of Aging-Alice and Richard Matzkin-oomphTV.com from oomphTV on Vimeo.

Ojai, California

Let us introduce ourselves. We are Alice and Richard Matzkin, and are both artists in our late sixties. Richard sculpts, Alice paints. Like so many others, we grew afraid as we entered middle age and began experiencing wrinkles, grey hair, and expanding waistlines. Instead of a psychiatrist couch, we used paint and clay to work through our fear and negative attitudes about aging. For fifteen years, I painted and interviewed older women, some famous, some without clothes. During the same period of time, Richard sculpted older men and elderly couples, also without clothes.

Through our art work and the writing of our art and inspirational book “The Art of Aging: Celebrating the Authentic Aging Self“, we have come to see our aging in a positive light. Our years have given us a wider perspective, deeper understanding of the meaning of our lives, and a true appreciation of the preciousness of now. We can honestly say that our present age is among the very best in our lives. We invite you to watch our oomphtv profile to learn more about who we are and the work that we share.

Now I am all set to meet my first child. Here is what happened since my last blog. Everyone who does this volunteer work with foster kids has to spend time helping with kids who are waiting to go to court. I shadowed a long time volunteer and escorted kids to court for hearings about their status – some had been there before and for some it was the first time. There are so many stories and the way that kids approach this ordeal is so different.

For instance, there were two sisters, one about nine, the other around 13.  They had been in the system for a while, living with an aunt. Through their social worker they told the judge that they didn’t want to see their adoption social worker (they were happy where they were) and they didn’t want to come to court next time (they are both good students and didn’t want to miss school). They seem to have adjusted to having been taken out of their home. On the other side of the spectrum was a boy, about 16, whom the judge had seen quite a bit. He had major attitude, wouldn’t talk, or even look at me as I brought him to the courtroom. The judge was angry with him for not going to summer school and was fairly blunt with him. Obviously, he hadn’t adjusted well. But is it his fault? Who knows what his situation is like.

I saw one family get their two girls back amidst merriment and tears. I met a 17-year old boy who had been in the system for about 8 years, knows he wants to be a massage therapist and seemed to be taking it all in stride.

After working with the kids, I went to see my supervisor to read about my first case. She had already explained over the phone that this is sort of an unusual – and difficult – case and asked if I would mind taking such a case. “We used to have a special group of volunteers for this kind of child,” she had said. Gulp…. Reading the files, I understood what she meant. This child, an eight-year-old girl had been in the system for a short time. Her mother was found wondering the streets, taking her two daughters from one short-term motel to the next. They were both sick when the social workers intervened and they were taken away from the mother. The mother had a long history of mental illness and had at times been catatonic. The father had a rap sheet – drug arrests, DUIs – two pages long.  The girl, my girl, had been at turns violent and defiant in the group home where she was brought and then quiet and non-communicative.

The girl, who was put into a residential therapeutic facility because of her behavior is on slew of psychotropic drugs and is still acting out. It is hard to know, at this point, whether the drugs are helping or hurting. That is part of my job, to try to sort that out. The rest of it is to make sure that the system is working for this child and doing the best for her that it can.

After that meeting, I switched gears and took my daughter to the east coast to look at colleges. New England was a riot of reds, yellows and oranges, with the changing of the leaves; and I savored this time… it is sort of strange how, as a parent, you help your child find the best place for her self so that she can leave. It is nothing if not bittersweet.

The weekend I came back to town there was an article in the Los Angeles Times about two foster children who had died. One committed suicide and the other was murdered. I don’t think they had a volunteer like me on their case. I found myself wondering if their lives would have been different if they had. And my resolve to help my girl turned to steel. A few days later, I met with my supervisor again. Now I am officially on the case and I need to start calling people. I’ll be back once I have met my child….

I am Linda D. and I am a food addict. When and where did this addiction come from? Aren’t we all food addicts to some degree or another? Everyone has to eat, right? These are some of the questions I’ve pondered during my meditation, during conversations, and on hundreds of other random occasions during the course of my working the FA- Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous program over the past 15-months.

Realizing that I was, in fact, an addict was the first step in my recovery. To these following questions, published in FA approved literature, I answered YES, YES, YES, YES…!

•    Have you ever wanted to stop eating and couldn’t? “Yah!”
•    Do you find yourself attempting one diet or food plan after another, with no lasting successes? “Totally!”
•    Do you eat differently in private than you do in front of other people? “U-ha.”
•    Has a doctor or family member ever approached you with concern about your eating habits or weight? “Yup.”
•    Do you eat large quantities of food at a time? “Sure.”
•    Is your weight problem due to “nibbling” all day long? “Partly.”
•    Do you eat to escape from your feelings? “Sometimes.”
•    Do you eat when you’re not hungry? “Often.”
•    Do you eat in secret? “I have.”
•    Do you frequently feel guilty or ashamed about what you’ve eaten? “Sadly.”
•    Are you waiting for your life to begin “when” you lose the weight? “Yes.”
•    Do you feel hopeless about your relationship with food? “I surrender!”

When I finally surrendered and said, “Enough is enough!,” that’s when my weight loss started. For me, and I think for countless other people, my addiction was in my head. I’m hard wired for flour and sweets. My problem default was to run to food when I was happy, sad, lonely, excited, celebratory, nervous, and God forbid, hungry. When did this chaos start? Well, let’s put it this way…as a child I named my first dog “Ralph” (named after the supermarket in my neighborhood.), my tortoise’s name is “Steak” (Yes,  “is” Steak because I still have him. He’s over 45-years old.), my baby doll’s name was “Sugar,” and I even named my cat after a popular cat food brand, “Frisky” (Wow! I just remembered that I used to sit and eat his cat food with him too. Ooooa!) I named things I loved after things I loved…food! My food addiction started a long time ago. Sugar and flour are drugs. They altered my chemistry. I felt different after eating them but I always wanted more.   How did I get it more? Being 7 years-old, what did I have to offer?   Boobies! The neighbor boys had candy cigarettes and I had boobies. It was the perfect barter. I carried that shame around for years. Food addiction started a long time ago for me.

Even with over 50 pounds of weight loss, I am still a food addict. With help, I have it in check one day at a time. There is no longer shame around my food or the way I look. The meals I make are made with ingredients that God intended me to eat—fruits, vegetables, meat, dairy and grains. Today, I cook better and more exciting meals than I did when I was heavy. Dinner used to be a bag of tortilla chips and salsa. Thank God those days are over.

If you think that you may be a food addict, there is a solution. Please visit foodaddicts.org to find a local chapter close to you and attend a few meetings.

Getting a good night’s sleep is something most of us take for granted. It simply happens. Or, at least it used to! These days, a consecutive, full night of rest is only occasional. Maybe that’s why I was drawn to an interview featuring psychiatrist Tom Wehr at the National Institute of Health. Dr. Wehr conducted a very interesting study on sleep. Young, healthy individuals were required to spend up to twelve hours per day in bed for almost a month. After several days, their sleep patterns started to stabilize at about eight hours of sleep per night. But the subjects were young and healthy, and oftentimes young people need more sleep than middle-aged or older adults. In addition, the subjects spent a tremendous amount of time in bed, which may have lead them to sleep longer. What would happen if this experiment were done with older individuals? Would we all start sleeping eight or more hours, even me?

I think I’d go plain crazy. As I get older, sleep is becoming more and more elusive. (Well, not compared to when I had a newborn and a toddler, which was no doubt the most tortuous sleep deprived period of my life.) As it turns out, historically, people would sleep in two bouts. The first bout was called first sleep, or dead sleep, and the second bout was called morning sleep. And the period in between? This was referred to as watch, or watching. Remember, this is when people lived from sun to sun, as a winter day could bring 14 hours of darkness. Clearly our environment is very different, with many of us in bed with a limited amount of time. This makes me curious about what the “real” recommendation of amount of sleep for those of us who are “middle aged” – meaning not twenty year olds, but not eighty year olds either.

What Dr. Wehr and others have found is that sleep tends to get more fragile as we age. Another physician, Dr. Mary Carskadon (Director of Chronobiology from Brown University who runs www.sleep for science) explains that brain waves loose their peaks as we age. Those peaks are what protects us from disturbances in the environment. (Clearly, my peaks are resembling small hills at this point.) But what can we do about it, and should we even care? There are sleep “strategies,” like naps, siestas, or restricting the number of hours in bed in order to encourage efficient sleep. Does this mean that as we age we should still aim for that magical number of eight hours of sleep per night?

Fortunately for me, the answer is no, depending on what study you read. I like the study by Dr. Daniel Kripke and his colleagues at the University of California at San Diego. (See http://health.ucsd.edu/healthinfo/videos/sleep.html for more information.) To summarize, over a million adults of all ages were studied in order to research the relationship between sleep duration and mortality. The results showed that people who slept seven hours per night had the lowest death rates over a six year period, while people who slept eight or more hours had a greater risk of dying over the same period. In fact, the greater the sleep duration beyond eight hours per night, the greater the death rate.

So what do I walk away with here? To relax. Sleep patterns tend to change as we age. When it’s 2:00a.m. and I am wide awake, I may just think about the two bouts of sleep that Colonial Americans experienced. From here on in, I’ll listen to my own body, and recognize that sleep, just like diet, is about moderation. Too little or too much may, in fact, be unhealthy.

My husband’s Mom is truly the most optimistic person I’ve ever known. At 93, she has been unable to get out of bed due to her very frail body, but that doesn’t seem to stop her. I phone her often and always ask her how she is. She responds with the same answer in an unusually upbeat tone, “I’m still here!” she rings out. At her recent birthday party, many of us agreed that it’s been her keen sense of optimism that has kept her alive. One friend remembered the phone call she shared with my mother in law a few years ago, immediately after she had lost her home in a fire. “Well,” said my mother in law “don’t you worry. Now you can go ahead and build the home you’ve always wanted!”

I, on the other hand, question whether or not I’m that optimistic. It’s not as though I’m pessimistic, but I’ve grown to be a bit cynical. On the other hand, I really seem to be hopeful. Is that the same thing as being optimistic? Not at all, according to Vaclav Havel. “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

Much to my surprise, it turns out that the sheer quality of having hope is a very potent weapon. According to Jennifer Cheavens, assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University, “hope is consistently associated with fewer symptoms of depression. And the good news is that hope is something that can be taught, and can be developed in many of the people who need it.” Hope is different from optimism, which is the expectancy that good things will happen. Instead, hope involves having goals, along with the desire and plan to achieve them.

Cheavens and her colleagues tested a hope therapy treatment by sampling a number of people recruited through flyers and newspaper ads. The ads asked the participants to attend weekly group meetings designed to increase the participants’ abilities to reach goals. Specifically, the researchers looked for people who were not diagnosed with mental illness or depression, but had a level of dissatisfaction with their lives. In the study, half the participants took part in group sessions led by trained leaders. Here they were taught hope-related skills, like identifying goals and ways to achieve them, along with how to motivate themselves to do so. The results, published in the journal Social Indicators Research, illustrated that the participants in the hope therapy had fewer depressive symptoms compared to the control group that didn’t participate.

“We’re finding that people can learn to be more hopeful. We have been figuring out what hopeful people are doing right, and taking those lessons and developing therapies and interventions for people who are not doing as well. And the great news is that it seems to work. We can teach people how to be more hopeful.”

The methodology used focused on developing a blueprint for goals, and using positive motivators to keep the goals in check. (Positive motivators can be anything from self-help talk with yourself, a friend or a source.) Not a bad piece of information to share, especially to folks like me who don’t always have the gut feeling that the glass is half full. With hope and a road map to get there, I plan on crafting a way to maintain a hopeful attitude which keeps my level of motivation in full gear.