Age is no barrier, it’s a limitation you put on your mind..

Slowing down ageing & increasing longevity..

Ageing has come more in focus off late, especially for those with chronic conditions. Rather than feeling powerless to ageing, we can instead focus on daily lifestyle choices that may not only add years to our lives, but vibrant, healthy, and functional life to the years we live.

This is where it’s important to understand the difference between lifespan and healthspan.

Live Longer — Lifespan

The total number of years we live.

Conventional medicine has increased life expectancy, no doubt. But this has not necessarily been accompanied by an equivalent increase in healthy life expectancy. People are living longer but many of those years are burdened by chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and even cancer.

Living Healthier — Healthspan

How many of those years we remain healthy and free from disease.

What we eat may be one of the most important lifestyle modifications any one of us can make to significantly increase our healthspan and add quality years of enjoyable life as we age.

Genes are Only 20% of the Picture — Epigenetics

It turns out only about 20 percent of how long we live is dictated by our genes, whereas the other 80 percent is dictated by our lifestyles. This means we have incredible power and control over our health in preventing chronic diseases and increasing our longevity.

Factors affecting ageing:

1. 80% Lifestyle depends on the state of your mitochondria: how efficiently the energy production centres of your cells perform and how much oxidative stress (systemic inflammation) they produce dictate how fast you age.

2. 20% Genetic part depends on the state of your telomeres: The speed of decay of the shoelace-cap like structures at the end of your chromosomes dictate how fast you age.

Mitochondrial dysfunction (80%, epigenetic) + accelerated telomere shortening (20%, genetic) together contribute to overall ageing..

And lays the groundwork for chronic diseases like insulin resistance, t2 diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular dysfunction, and cognitive decline to manifest.

Controlling Ageing via Functional Medicine

Ageing is inevitable and starts the moment we’re born. But we have control over the pace and quality of ageing. These include:

1. Quality sleep

2. Caloric restriction and time-restricted eating

3. Strength training and HIIT workouts

4. Single-ingredient wholefoods, plant-rich and ideally omnivorous