It's Hot!

And Caring for Elders (and Ourselves) is About to Heat Up

Hot weather is matched by hot news. Nope, not the G20 deal on a Belt-and-Road-countering rail link between India, the Middle East and Europe. And not the awful earthquake in Morocco. I’m going to go on yet another health rant this week. Not because I’m a health freak. Truly I’m not. I’m a pleasantly padded middle-aged lady with a penchant for extreme… moderation. But moderation includes a deep devotion to preventive everything. And health comes top in Q3. Not just for ourselves - but for our kids. Love your kids? Take care of your health! Here’s why.

My news week started with a big NYT feature on longevity titled Can America Age Gracefully? A massive piece of work, it effectively pushes the ageing issue way up the strategic ladder, framing it as one of the key economic, demographic and social shifts of our time. One sub-section is titled You Shouldn’t Have to Take Care of Your Aging Parents On Your Own:

Already, around 42 million Americans are providing informal support to someone 50 or older, and many of them are struggling under the financial and psychological pressure. That number will only grow as the nation ages. Being an aging nation also means becoming a nation of caregivers, one that requires a new system of support.

I also interviewed Haleh Nazeri from the World Economic Forum for Season 4 of my 4-Quarter Lives podcast (launches September 20th!). We discussed the WEF’s report Living Longer Better, and her big takeaway: that fully 2/3 of people interviewed saw elder caregiving in their futures. With some degree of dread.

On average, family caregivers are spending 26% of their income on caregiving activities. In the United Kingdom, a report from Carers UK found that more than 600 people a day leave paid employment to care for a loved one, with many facing financial hardship as a result.

It reminds me of the age I was (around 50) when suddenly all your friends start talking about how their parents are faring.

Taking It Personally

As someone who managed their parents’ Q4 ill-health for an extended period, one of my biggest motivations for staying healthy is I really, really don’t want to have my kids caring for me - at least not for too long. I don’t mind a year or two of appropriate concern and inter-continental commuting towards the end. Caring is a supremely human and inter-generational love language. We all deserve to be both lost and loved.

But I’d like to avoid having my kids become responsible for anything that I could have been responsible for (if only I’d known, or started early enough, or not been quite so lazy). My son called this morning and laughed admiringly at my sweaty dedication to my 9am circuits class. He may not quite understand how much I’m doing this for him. Or perhaps even more for my daughter, since a (slowly-reducing) majority of elder-carers are still daughters (61% in the latest US data).

The Ultimate Gift For Your Kids? Your Own Health

As part of what I call my ‘smart and lazy’ mantra, I have several birds I’m trying to hit with my fitness stone:

1. Ageism Ages: I’m breaking my kids’ stereotypes of ageing and what people can do in their 60s. (Going back to school wasn’t bad either).

2. Longevity = Lifestyle: The role modelling of keeping fit, sleeping extensively (check out this amazing Economist chart of the world’s sleep patterns) and eating nutritiously, the basic building blocks of healthy ageing, seems to have rubbed off on the next generation. Stress is the final pillar, but a lot harder to control. (Not to mention the elephant in the ageing space which is inequality. Because the biggest predictor of longevity is your post code. In my London borough of Lambeth, it ranges by 10 years from one area to the next.)

3. The Ultimate Inter-Generational Gift: I’m committed to maximising my healthspan so that I can reduce the sick-span where the kids could get roped in for too long. Sick parents are no fun. The buck stops here.

So when my friend Yasmin, who knows me well, gifted me a book called Deep Fitness, she knew she was hitting my sweet spot. It melds mindfulness and strength training to focus on building muscle and fighting sarcopenia (yup, that word again) - and says you can do this in 30 minutes - a week!. OK, that’s my kind of training! Not only does it please every lazy bone in my body, it (endearingly) turns a lot of sport science on its head and connects muscle health to metabolic health in interesting ways. I can’t (yet) vouch for its efficacy, but if anyone has already tried this, do let me know. I will report back.

It’s arguing that most training today is based on science from the 1960s and privileges aerobics and effort (no wonder our workaholic cultures subscribe). Their approach is different. It’s built on a very slow lifting of weights to a point where your muscles fail. And you only do it once. That’s enough, they insist, to shock the buggers into building. And then you rest - to leave them time to do the rebuilding. That’s why 30 minutes: shock, rest, rebuild. They also start connecting dots that haven’t been connected before. That muscles are much more important than we know. And that muscular health impacts metabolic health. So that strengthening your muscles can make you healthier in unexpected ways. It’s slow, smart - and lazy.

Mental Health = Metabolic Health

OK, eyebrows raising anyone? Coincidentally, the next day I was reading an article by my friend and Harvard ALI colleague, Virginia Gleason, that also talked about metabolic health, but this time in relation to mental health. She interviews a psychiatrist at Harvard, Dr. Christopher Palmer.

There's a burgeoning field called nutritional psychiatry that suggests that maybe diet can play a role in mental health. Most people in that field focus on how diet might help depression and anxiety but believe that it doesn't help with other things. They doubt that it helps with real brain disorders like ADHD, or autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

Dr Palmer says that the truth is it does. And that the reality is hiding ‘in plain sight’ across 200 years of research (which he has combed through) linking psychological and metabolic disorders. In the usual serendipity of my weeks, I happened upon this Economist article that echoes this, titled How Food Affects the Mind, as Well as the Body. “It turns out,” it says, that “you are what you eat after all.”

To the moderate matron I am, this all makes intuitive sense. It might also help explain why mental health has gotten dramatically worse over the past decade. What if it wasn’t just social media? What if it was a more complex combination of what we eat, how we sleep, and how immobile we’ve become? Which brings me to the last item in my in-tray (thanks to whoever sent it, I can’t remember).

Netflix Gets In On the Ageing Action

They’ve made a film about the secrets of the Blue Zones that National Geographic Fellow Dan Buettner made famous. He found five places in the world with a disproportionate number of centenarians - and the commonalities between them that might explain why. He found that community, a Mediterranean diet, purpose and balance were the secrets to a longer life.

Before you watch, know that the whole Blue Zone idea has been challenged from multiple angles. Here’s a representative objection from Dr. Saul Newman in Australia:

“Yes, they have an average lifespan of 86 and 83. But so do all 125 million citizens of Japan, all of the citizens of Hong Kong, all of the citizens of Singapore… you're just going to a rich part of town and saying gee, people live a long time in the rich part of town… if we did the equivalent in London, and went to the rich part of London, I would expect the average life expectancy to be 10 years higher than what it is in Loma Linda.”

Nir Barzilai is (among a long list of leadership roles) the Director of the Institute for Ageing Research. He’s been tracking thousands of centenarians for decades. In his book, Age Later: Health Span, Life Span, and the New Science of Longevity. He argues that centenarians don’t actually do anything different to the rest of us. They are different from the rest of us. They live longer. And the explanation is genetic. He’s identified several ‘longevity genes.’

So, in the end, you’re born to live longer or you aren’t. But you can extend your healthspan with a few pretty common sense lifestyle basics. So don’t sweat it. I always loved foodie Michael Pollan’s pithy phrase about good diet: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” For ageing, it would be “eat food, sleep well, love much and move more.” Better suggestions, anyone?

In the meantime, kiss your folks, and take care of yourself. They’ll love you for it.

Also Watching/ Reading/ Thinking

• 6 Leadership Lessons from Barbie - Don’t Over Pink It. Tired of reading about this movie yet? One more. I couldn’t resist, of course. And delighted in co-creating this FORBES piece with my good friend Andrea Kayne, a Leadership Professor at DePaul University in Chicago.

• Wisdom as Science: a talk by Dr Dilip Jeste. Author of Wiser: The Scientific Roots of Wisdom, Compassion, and What Makes Us Good. In conversation with Design Age Institute’s Director Colum Lowe. I like this quote: “Wisdom not shared is wisdom not gained but lost.”

From Dr Dilip Jeste

• Brainstorming with the UK’s International Longevity Centre, in the run up to their international research push on creating the longevity-ready society. Here’s a snippet of the Director, David Sinclair, setting up the day:

  

  

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