Longevity & Health

by: Mark Sircus Ac., OMD
Medical News - December 23, 2003

Longevity and health are related subjects. In fact they are inseparable. Both are crucial subjects if one wishes at all to avoid the horrors of disease and untimely miserable death. Disease obviously involves a great deal of pain and suffering and does the utmost to shorten our natural life spans. In an age where disease is on the rise one does well to invest oneself in a reasonable study of basic subjects like health and longevity. What is the point of living longer if we are going to spend the ending part of our life suffering from diseases? As everyone knows, cancer is not a good way to go.

There are four 'basic' legs to longevity, and thus to health. Today there is a group of scientists, philosophers, and futurists who advocate a strategy known as calorie restriction, or C.R. Food purists have always held the basic monopoly on longevity in health circles but they are standing on a chair with only one leg, though obviously an important one. The second leg is appropriate exercise. There is great common sense to eating right and getting plenty of exercise no matter how old one is. The third leg is more obscure and difficult to deal with even among the many who follow the first two paths. Emotional intelligence is a great factor in health and a lack of it an important issue in the formation of disease. A vast subject it can be represented by the example that a person prone to chronic anger will not last as long in life as a more peaceful and harmonious person. The fourth leg of our chair might be the most surprising one for it is sex and the quality of our sexuality is very much related to our emotional intelligence. Nothing lifts our boats over the waters of life with greater ease than a great sex life with someone we really love.

Each of these subjects is worthy of book length discussion and there are fine books that cover each separately. The challenge though for health enthusiasts is to put them together in a plan that is balanced and works right for them. When people, the press and health care officials take the subjects separately you get all kinds of distorted ideas. For example there's no shortage of skepticism about calorie restriction in the scientific community. An article in this month's issue of The American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the leading journal on obesity research, concluded that caloric intake was not as important in staving off death by cardiovascular disease as other factors, like physical activity. Others warn that extreme dieting like an ultra low-calorie regimen can lead to mental health problems. Clearly people who fixate too much on food have some kind of mild to severe obsessive-compulsive disorder with eating, which is most of us after all.

Calorie restriction is simple, the less we eat, to a point, the more efficiently our body works. Researchers have known about the powers of eating less since the 1930's, when a Cornell University nutrition professor unexpectedly discovered that dieting rats tend to live 30 percent longer. And in full view of the world, on the Japanese island of Okinawa, where residents have traditionally followed a diet similar to that of C.R., an unusually high number of people have lived a century or more. There is a lot of sense to slim and trim. Part of the point though is to eat clean organic substances that do not clog the body with pesticides, food preservatives and additives, or hormones that are pumped like crazy into milk, dairy and meat products. Getting a hold of ones eating life in a non-compulsive way is a great challenge for westerners for food is our great passion and number one compulsion. Within this category comes clean air and water and a minimum dependence on drugs that have side effects due to their toxicity. Clean and slim says it all here.

Exercise is the easiest of the four legs to deal with except for lazy people who cannot go down the block without their car. Though people can make a compulsion out of exercise it is perhaps the healthiest addiction anyone can have. Though there are people who literally run themselves into the ground, or who cannot listen to their body's feedback messages when they are overdoing it, it's the exception and not the rule. There is no reason to avoid exercise and there is always one well suited for one's age and lifestyle.

Perhaps before dealing with the complexity of emotional intelligence in health it would be simpler to talk about sex. A healthy sexual life is one of the most balancing aspects in our life and affects our physiological and psychological selves positively in all respects. The ancient Chinese were known to have said that a man or woman who can relax into sex could live for a thousand years. Though obviously prose with poetic meaning it was pointing to a truth which most westerners overlook. Modern sexologists are well aware of the health promoting effect of orgasm on the endocrine system of women and this is a crucial factor in how a woman enters mid life biological changes. For a man, as he ages, if his sexual strength is maintained his basic life vitality remains and this is very dependent on the number of orgasms he is having. As a man ages he needs to conserve his energy by restraining from physical ejaculations, which in youth seemed unlimited, but in doing so he has no need to restrain from making love. For the older man, the more he restrains from physical ejaculation the more he wants to and is capable of making love. In this subject the truth is exactly opposite to what most men think. There are levels of ecstasy and orgasm that transcend the quick release so common to western man but unfortunately few men and women discipline themselves to such things.

Emotional intelligence brings us to what I call Heart Intelligence or HeartHealth, which is the title and subject of a book (freely downloadable - see below). This is perhaps the most crucial leg we stand on for when this one crumbles all the others fall with it. Simply put, we are born with a vulnerability of being, and when we lose this we lose something enormously important to our health and happiness. Few people have been able to explain why one person falls ill and others do not. Why some people can chain smoke for decades and not get cancer and others do. Deep inside of us is our being, our feeling as opposed to our thinking center. How we are in our beings has more to do with what happens in our lives then any doctor will ever admit or know. Disease starts when we separate from our own feelings, from the heart center that just feels. Thus denial or repression of feelings in anyway gets mirrored almost immediately in the immune system. The immune system is really a reflection of the entire body plus the mind and our emotional health. That is why you can have, in the middle of an epidemic, those individuals who remain healthy because their immune system is very strong for the reason that their beings are centered in a power place.

A Dr. Reinhold Voll said, "For each pain, there is a reason in the depths of consciousness." And a Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer discovered that deeply traumatic physical events combined with internal emotional reactions create what he called a 'biological conflict shock' that will manifest themselves as a visible physical transformation in the brain as well as measurable changes in physical-nervous parameters. Dr. Hamer traced most cancers back to such conflict shocks and insisted, "The main task in every case of cancer is to find the original emotional shock experience and make sure that it has been healed or is being healed." What both of these doctors are referring to are places and states of consciousness that only make sense when one understands what is or what is not happening on a being level. States of being, or states of consciousness, are beyond the understanding of the modern doctor who is trained obsessively on the physical level only.

Within this leg of emotional intelligence is also social intelligence, which includes important things like our listening and communication skills. What is happening or not happening in our most significant relationships is as crucial to our happiness and health as human beings as almost anything else in life. It is easy to knock someone off a chair with three legs and it's a miracle when we get by standing on only one. Health and medicine are not simple subjects especially when information is badly fragmented. In today's world it is difficult to get good information that defragments our inner programs and strangely there are people who would not like us to piece together any kind of story that would lead to a long life of good health since there is no money in it for them or their industries. Life is not easy in our fast paced world and the stress levels all around are increasing. We could sum this all up by just saying that it's safest and smartest to sit in a four-legged chair.