Meet the new faces of middle age
Preventive health, active social life can extend your prime years
As an outreach coordinator for Central Wyoming College, Michele Burdick organizes "lifelong learning" classes, many of which help her fellow citizens in tiny Dubois (population 988) acquire new skills, improve their personal health, and strengthen their community. A transplanted Easterner to this cowboy and outdoorsman's paradise in the Wind River Mountains, Burdick, 62, walks her talk. Her time is about evenly divided among work (she's also a real-estate agent), fun (tennis, skiing, riding horses, hiking), community activism (she volunteers to promote recreation, tourism, and children's issues), and friends. "What I don't do any more is cook breakfast for Butch," she jokes, referring to her husband, Butch Burdick, a state brand inspector. "That woman disappeared when our kids grew up."
Meet the New Middle Age, as personified by Michele and a generation of women like her who are extending the prime of life, with all its rich emotional, intellectual, and spiritual potential, way beyond the short horizons that defined their mothers' middle years. Are you among them? If so, you know that a lengthy, vibrant "second act" rests upon two key pillars.
- The first pillar: a lifelong commitment to preventive health. This is where we come in. We've sifted through the latest research about how to remain physically strong, ward off diabetes and heart disease, preserve perceptual skills, and bolster an immune-boosting sunny outlook.
- The second pillar: an active social life. We're all aware of the protective benefits of emotionally satisfying relationships. Now, new research details the advantages conferred by happy friendships — advantages so powerful they reach even to people on the fringes of those friendships.
Exponents of The New Middle Age intuitively grasp this "power of the people." Several days a week, Michele and six close women friends arrange to go horseback riding, discuss poetry and novels, watch a video, or just sip wine. The payback: "I feel really energetic and alive," Michele says. "And I want to have that feeling for a long, long time."
Armed with knowledge her mother never had, she can trust that these good times will stretch out for years to come. We outline the building blocks of The New Middle Age here and show you how to imbue your second act with more personal contentment, joy, and vibrancy than you ever thought possible.
Building block: a strong heart
It's the engine that drives an active lifestyle, essential to your ability to maintain healthy muscles and bones, a sharp mind — even an upbeat attitude.
Your Mom's Middle Age: It was all about cholesterol. If it was normal, she'd ignore it; if it was high, she'd control it with a low-fat diet.
The New Middle Age: Get a heart scan after menopause.
Even women with normal cholesterol levels can have heart disease, so "talk to your doctor about getting a CT coronary artery scan," says Mehdi Razavi, MD, a heart specialist at the Texas Heart Institute. The test, which measures calcium accumulation in arteries (a predictor of heart attack risk), can spot trouble even when other tests, such as those that check cholesterol levels, are normal.
Building block: good vision
A sharp pair of eyes is key to getting up and down the mountain, so to speak — and reveling in all of nature's glory during the hike. Sadly, age-related macular degeneration, a disease that damages the retina, eventually threatens the vision of about one-third of people.
Your Mom's Middle Age: What will be will be. She — and her doctors — believed that AMD could not be prevented.
The New Middle Age: See better with supplements. Those with vitamins C and E, beta-carotene, and zinc can slow vision loss by 25 percent in people with early signs of AMD, according to health economist David B. Rein, PhD, a scientist at the research firm RTI International in Research Triangle Park, NC.
Building block: comic relief
A good laugh is one of the easiest and most reliable tools for managing health-debilitating stress.
Your Mom's Middle Age: She laughed when she felt like it. Experts then thought a sense of humor was determined only by your genes — you're either cheerful or you're not.
The New Middle Age: Schedule regular "laughercise." Loma Linda University researcher Lee Berk, DrPH, has tested the effects of what he calls "mirthful laughter" by asking volunteers to spend time doing nothing more complicated than watching TV comedies. He found that even anticipating a laugh improves function of immune-enhancing hormones. Berk's latest study found that over the course of a year, the levels of good HDL cholesterol in volunteers participating in a mirthful-laughter group jumped 26 percent, while their levels of C-reactive proteins, a measure of inflammation linked to both heart disease and diabetes risk, dropped 66 percent. "We call it laughercise," he explains, "because the benefits of laughter are so much like those of physical activity."
Building block: stable blood sugar
For most people, type 2 diabetes is preventable — meaning the associated higher risks of heart attack, circulation problems, and dementia are, too.
Your Mom's Middle Age: She tried to eat complex carbs — whole grains, nuts, and vegetables — which studies then suggested was the key to preventing diabetes.
The New Middle Age: Focus more on total calories. "Losing weight if you're overweight is the single most important thing you can do," says William C. Knowler, MD, DrPH, a diabetes researcher with the National Institutes of Health. Osama Hamdy, MD, PhD, of the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, says overweight people should shoot for losing about 7 percent of their total body weight: "For most people, that's enough to cut their risk of developing diabetes in half."
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