{"product_id":"healthy-aging-isbn-9780307277541","title":"Healthy Aging","description":"\u003cb\u003e#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A unique book about aging that draws on the science of biogerontology as well as on the secrets of healthy longevity—from “American’s best-known doctor” (\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Magazine).\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In each of his widely acclaimed, best-selling books, Dr. Andrew Weil has been an authoritative and companionable guide through a uniquely effective combination of traditional and nontraditional approaches to health and healthy living. Dr. Weil explains that there are a myriad of things we can do to keep our bodies and minds in good working order through all phases of life. Hugely informative, practical, and uplifting, \u003ci\u003eHealthy Aging\u003c\/i\u003e is infused with the engaging candor and common sense that have made Dr. Weil our most trusted source on healthy living. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e With detailed information on: \u003cbr\u003e -Learning to eat right: Following the anti-inflammatory diet, Dr. Weil’s guide to the nutritional components of a healthy lifestyle\u003cbr\u003e -Separating myth from fact about the would-be elixirs of life extension — herbs, hormones, and anti-aging “medicines”\u003cbr\u003e -Learning exercise, breathing and stress-management techniques to benefit your mind and body\u003cbr\u003e -Understanding the science behind the aging process\u003cbr\u003e -Keeping record of your life lessons to share with loved ones\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eHealthy Aging \u003c\/i\u003efeatures a glossary, an appendix summarizing the Anti-Inflammatory Diet and an appendix of additional resources.\u003cp\u003e“Dr. Weil has arguably become American’s best-known doctor.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times  Magazine \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Forget plastic surgery. Skip the pricey face creams and the drugs for  creaky bodies. Natural-medicine champion Weil, who’s now in his sixties, covers longevity  research, aging, and how he’s embracing the experience.” —\u003ci\u003eLife \u003c\/i\u003eMagazine\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Weil wants  us to be sensible about growing old. . . . He argues that we should not fight aging.  There’s no winning that war. Instead, we should concentrate on aging well. —\u003ci\u003eThe  Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eANDREW  WEIL, M.D., is a world-renowned leader and pioneer in the field of  integrative medicine, a healing oriented approach to health care which  encompasses body, mind, and spirit. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCombining  a Harvard education and a lifetime of practicing natural and preventive  medicine, Dr. Weil is the founder and director of the Arizona Center  for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona Health Sciences  Center, where he is also a Clinical Professor of Medicine and Professor  of Public Health and the Lovell-Jones Professor of Integrative  Rheumatology. Dr. Weil received both his medical degree and his  undergraduate AB degree in biology (botany) from Harvard University.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDr. Weil is a \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling author and internationally-recognized expert for his views  on leading a healthy lifestyle, his philosophy of healthy aging, and his  critique of the future of medicine and health care. Approximately 10  million copies of Dr. Weil's books have been sold, including \u003ci\u003eSpontaneous Healing\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003e8 Weeks to Optimum Health\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eEating Well for Optimum Health\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Healthy Kitchen\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eHealthy Aging\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eWhy Our Health Matters\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eImmortality\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eQuestion:\u003c\/i\u003e If you could live forever, would you and why?\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnswer:\u003c\/i\u003e I would not live forever, because we should not live forever,  because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever,  but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e—Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss USA Contest\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Our attitudes toward aging and our responses to the changes in appearance  that aging brings are totally colored by our knowledge that we are moving  inexorably toward death. It is not my intention to write about death or  the fear of dying in this book, but I find it impossible to avoid  mentioning them as the source of our negative feelings about aging, which  are entirely based in fear.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Some species age more slowly than we do, others more rapidly. I have lived  with dogs for many years and have watched several canine companions grow  up, grow old, and die. As I write, I am looking at a photograph from  several years ago of two of my Rhodesian ridgebacks on the front step of  my house in southern Arizona. One is a young male, Jambo, who could not be  more than a year old in the photo. He is standing—sleek, handsome, with  all the vitality of youth. The other, B.T., must have been fifteen, very  old for such a large breed. She is lying down, her face completely white.  Soon she was unable to get up. I helped her through her decline but  finally had to euthanize her a day before her sixteenth birthday.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Jambo is now eight years old, still in his prime, still sleek, handsome,  and vital, with a deep, soulful personality that makes him an ideal  companion animal. Most people who meet him comment on how good-looking he  is, the perfect combination of strength and beauty. Sometimes if I am  reading in bed at night, I invite him to come up and sit beside me for a  few minutes. If I rub his chest in a certain way, he looks up toward the  ceiling, extending his neck in a posture of noble contentment that I find  very appealing. But when he is in this position, I cannot avoid noticing  the first white hairs on his otherwise black chin. And whenever I see  them, I also cannot avoid noticing that there are more than the last time  I looked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I know from experience that this dusting of white heralds the changes to  come, that one day he, too, will be frosted with the white of old age; and  when I see those signs of aging on his strong chin, I think about the  disappearance of black from my own facial hair, about the unalterable  passage of time, the relentless change of physical bodies as we decline. I  think about the pain of the loss of previous companions, about separation  from beings I love and who love me, about my own fear of the end and the  sadness that is never separable from the joy of human experience. And all  of this has come from the observation of a few white hairs on the chin of  my dog.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    We all sense the finiteness of life, and we all fantasize about living  forever. Is it any wonder, then, that we put so much effort into denying  the fact of our aging with cosmetics, plastic surgery, and verbal deceits  (“You look so much younger!”), and why we are so enthralled by proponents  of antiaging medicine who tell us that we can stop or even turn back the  clock?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Immortality is an alluring concept, but I wonder how many of us have  thought through its meaning and implications, which turn out not to be so  simple. If you lived beyond the normal human life span, what would your  life be like? I invite you to look at immortality with me through the lens  of biology. Apart from framing this discussion of healthy aging, it will  give you a chance to become acquainted with the latest findings of  scientists who are studying the aging process. All of the practical advice  I have to give you in Part Two of this book is based on this scientific  evidence* and grounded in a philosophy that rejects immortality and  eternal youthfulness as unworthy goals.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A tension between mortality and immortality is played out on all levels of  our being, from our cells to our psyches. Understanding it will help you  accept the fact of aging and motivate you to learn to do it as gracefully  as possible.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e******************\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Let’s start with immortality on the cellular level. Until 1961,  researchers believed that, in theory at least, normal cells, taken from  the body and grown in laboratories, should be able to grow and divide  forever if their needs were met: if they were provided with a constant  supply of food and if their waste products were removed. In that year,  Leonard Hayflick and Paul Moorhead at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia  demonstrated that this was not so, that all normal cells have a fixed  limit on the number of times they can divide in order to replace  themselves. This number is now known as the Hayflick limit. Hayflick,  currently a professor of anatomy at the School of Medicine, at the  University of California, San Francisco, is one of the foremost  biogerontologists. His book How and Why We Age, first published in 1994,  is the best I have found on the subject. I recommend it highly.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It turns out that the Hayflick limit varies from species to species and  often correlates with life span. With a Hayflick limit of about   50 cell divisions, humans are the longest-lived mammals. Mice, which live  about three years, have a limit of 15 divisions; for chickens,   with an average life span of twelve years, the number is about 25. At the  extreme of longevity, the Galápagos tortoise, which can live for 175  years, has a Hayflick limit of 110.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    HeLa cells, however, can divide indefinitely. They do not senesce. They  continue to grow and divide as long as they have nutrients, oxygen, space,  and means of getting rid of their wastes. HeLa cells were the first human cells to be successfully cultured outside the body in  large numbers. Given their longevity, they revolutionized biological and  medical research and quickly established themselves in laboratories around  the world. HeLa cells ignore the Hayflick limit for human cells. In a  sense, they are immortal.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I was taught that “HeLa” was composed of the initial letters of the name  of a woman, Helen Lane, who was said to be the original source of the  cells. This turns out not to have been true. The real source was Henrietta  Lacks, a poor African-American woman from Baltimore, whose story only came  out years after her cells were growing in prodigious numbers everywhere.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Lacks was born to a family of tobacco pickers in Virginia, moved to  Baltimore in 1943 at the age of twenty-three, married, and had five  children in quick succession. Then, early in 1951, she noticed she had  abnormal vaginal bleeding. She went to a clinic at The Johns Hopkins  Hospital, where a doctor found an ominous-looking, quarter-sized tumor on  her uterine cervix. He biopsied it and sent the tissue sample off for  diagnosis. It was malignant. Shortly afterward, Lacks returned to the  clinic to begin radium treatments, but before the first one, another  tissue sample from the tumor was taken and sent, this time to George Gey,  head of tissue culture research at Johns Hopkins.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Gey, with his wife, Margaret, had been trying to find human cells that  would grow well outside the body. His greater goal was to study cancer in  order to find a cure. Henrietta Lacks’s biopsy gave him exactly what he  needed. Her cancer cells grew in test tubes as no other cells had ever  grown, vigorously and aggressively. Of course, this did not augur well for  their donor. Within months, Lacks’s tumor had metastasized throughout her  body, creating tumors in all her organs until she expired painfully in a  racially segregated ward of The Johns Hopkins Hospital on October 4, 1951,  eight months after diagnosis. On the same day, George Gey went on national  television to announce his breakthrough in cancer research. He held up a  vial of Lacks’s cells, calling them, for the first time, HeLa cells.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    HeLa cells were soon in great demand. The Geys sent vials of them to  colleagues, who sent them to other colleagues, and before long Henrietta  Lacks’s cancerous cells were multiplying in laboratories throughout the  world. They made possible the development of the first polio vaccine, were  used to study the effects of drugs and radiation, genetic mechanisms, and  many diseases, and were even sent off the planet on a space shuttle to see  how cultured human cells would grow in zero gravity. If the HeLa cells  worldwide were added up, they would total many, many times the weight of  the human being in which they originated.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The saga of Henrietta Lacks raises uncomfortable ethical and social  questions, because she never gave informed consent for her cells to be  used in this way, neither she nor her family was ever compensated for  their use (they did not even find out about all this until twenty-four  years after the fact), and none of the scientists who worked with HeLa  cells ever acknowledged her contribution. But that is another story.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Why can HeLa cells go on living, perhaps forever, when the human being who  produced them is long dead and when most cells senesce after a fixed  number of divisions? What determines how many times cells from different  organisms can divide? The answers are encoded in DNA, our genetic  material. DNA is contained in rodlike structures called chromosomes in the  nucleus of every cell. When cells are about to divide in order to  reproduce and make more tissue, chromosomes have to replicate themselves,  so that each daughter cell will have the same genetic information as its  parent cell. The DNA spirals that comprise the chromosomes uncoil so that  the genetic code can be copied to make duplicate strands, but each time  this process occurs, something is lost: a piece of the end of each strand.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Chromosomes terminate in a distinctive region of DNA called a telomere;  the name comes from Greek roots meaning “end bodies.” Telomeres have been  likened to the plastic tips at the ends of shoelaces, but that is not an  accurate simile, because there is no cap. Rather, the telomere is a  repeating sequence of six “letters” (amino acids) of DNA code—TTAGGG—that  might be translated in English as THEEND. This sequence repeats thousands  of times in a young cell. The mechanics of DNA replication are such that a  portion of the telomere is lost with each cell division. At the Hayflick  limit, the length of remaining telomere is insufficient to allow further  duplication of DNA strands to occur without serious genetic mishaps  resulting. So there is no more cell division, no more reproductive life.  Instead, there is senescence and, eventually, cell death.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The discovery of telomeres and their possible relationship with the  maximum life span of organisms has been one of the most important advances  in the fields of genetics and biogerontology. It has allowed researchers  to solve one of the great mysteries of cancer—namely, how cancer cells  become immortal and go on dividing until they kill the organism in which  they arise. In 1985, Drs. Carol Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn reported  the discovery of telomerase, an enzyme that adds more six-letter units to  telomeres, making up for their normal loss during cell division. They  first found it in a microscopic one-celled animal called Tetrahymena that  lives in freshwater lakes and streams and is commonly used in genetics  research, but telomerase has since been found in many multicellular  organisms, including humans. Although it almost never occurs in normal  cells, most cancer cells produce it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Malignant transformation is a complex process involving the suppression of  some genes and the activation of others, sometimes in response to  carcinogenic agents, sometimes not. Malignant cells are unresponsive to  general controls on growth and development and a threat to their normal  neighbors, but it is a long way from malignant transformation of one or  many cells to a clinically significant cancer with the potential to kill  its host. Many cancer cells die because their genetics and metabolism are  hopelessly deranged or because they outgrow their blood supply. Others are  weeded out by the body’s defensive systems. Those that survive will run up  against the Hayflick limit—unless they acquire the ability to produce  telomerase. A gene for telomerase expression is present in many cells but  is inactive. (I will explain why it’s there in a moment.) If a cancer cell  manages to turn it on, and thus produce the enzyme to lengthen telomeres,  it can divide indefinitely, giving rise to a clone of malignant cells that  can eventually become a detectable tumor.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This is what happened in Henrietta Lacks’s cervix. HeLa cells owe their  unlimited growth to telomerase. Telomerase expression is probably not the  only path to cellular immortality, because 10 percent of tumors seem able  to rebuild their telomeres without it; evidently, they find some other  gene product to achieve the same end. As researchers close in on the fine  details of cellular immortalization, new possibilities for cancer  diagnosis and treatment may emerge. Detection of telomerase in tissue  samples may announce the presence of cancer in its earliest, most curable  stages. If we can find a way to suppress telomerase expression—to turn off  the gene that controls it—we may be able to render cancer cells mortal  again and stop their relentless growth. That may take too long to be a  primary treatment, but it may be very useful as a backup approach to  prevent metastasis, without the toxicity of conventional chemotherapy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    *For the reader’s convenience, a glossary of some of the scientific terms  I employ appears after the text.","brand":"Anchor","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304592265445,"sku":"NP9780307277541","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307277541.jpg?v=1767728824","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/healthy-aging-isbn-9780307277541","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}