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.

We profile Rose Gilbert, who has inspired and mentored countless students and colleagues over her fifty years as an iconic high school teacher, and continues to do so every day at 89 years of age.

Rose Gilbert – 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.

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.