Do You Really Want Fries With That?

Science Daily (Apr. 25, 2008) — "America's aging citizens are facing a health care workforce

too small and unprepared to meet their needs, according to a new report from the Institute

of Medicine (IOM) titled 'Retooling for an Aging America: Building the Health Care

Workforce' ." This warning from last year has not been heeded. As we head further into this

recession, as medical costs increase and co-pay deductibles increase, medical care for the

aging "boomers" dwindles dangerously.

According to the Gerontological Society of America (GSA), a labor pool of adequate size and

competency to care for a rapidly increasing over-65 population is mandatory. In their

report, they said that there is ".. a much-needed strategy for developing a network of

health professionals and frontline workers to avert a crisis in quality care for older

persons. Complex chronic illness is an issue that we all will face with age. The current

fragmented system of care desperately requires an increase in better-prepared personnel to

sustain itself.The combination of the aging of the Baby Boom generation and the increase in life expectancy is going to yield a doubling of the numbers of older people , and it's important to

understand that older people themselves account for a disproportionate amount of the

utilization of health care resources."

Marie Bernard, MD, president of The Association for Gerontology in Higher Education (GSA's

educational unit), said "..policymakers must act quickly to address these problems.

To meet the needs of our aging parents and grandparents, we need to increase the number of

geriatric health specialists — both to provide care for those older adults with the most

complex issues and to train the rest of the workforce in the common medical problems of old

age," Bernard said.

We "Boomers" must act in our own interests to insure that we are subjected to the fewest

number of age related illnesses as possible, and this begins with the WEIGHT EPIDEMIC in our

age group ( a reported 1 in 4 is OBESE!) The bottom-line message from a decades-long study

of monkeys on a restricted diet is simple: Consuming fewer calories leads to a longer,

healthier life.

Writing July 10 in the journal Science, a team of researchers at the University of

Wisconsin-Madison, the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center and the William S.

Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital reports that a nutritious but reduced-calorie diet

blunts aging and significantly delays the onset of such age-related disorders as cancer,

diabetes, cardiovascular disease and brain atrophy.

"We have been able to show that caloric restriction can slow the aging process in a primate

species," says Richard Weindruch, a professor of medicine in the UW-Madison School of

Medicine and Public Health who leads the National Institute on Aging-funded study. "We

observed that caloric restriction reduced the risk of developing an age-related disease by a

factor of three and increased survival. In terms of overall animal health", Weindruch notes,

"the restricted diet leads to longer lifespan and improved quality of life in old age. There

is a major effect of caloric restriction in increasing survival if you look at deaths due to

the diseases of aging," he says.

In the following picture, see what person these brave cousins of ours look like, and how old

do they appear? This is visual proof of the effectiveness of a healthy diet and moderate

exercise (how much room does the monkey have to move?). Start making the corrections

today...the number of years you have left is up to you!