Dr. Peterson’s 5 Health Habits for Men
(and the Women Who Love Them)
Dr. Noel Peterson
#1 Stay Strong with smart exercise. Of all the lifestyle factors affecting longevity, exercise continues to lead the pack. In fact, researchers with the Veterans Affairs recently completed a study of 15,860 men, and found that after 7 ½ years, those who were “highly fit” had an all-cause 50% reduction in mortality, and “very highly fit” men had a 70% reduced all-cause mortality when compared to men of “low fitness”. That’s right, exercise fitness confers a 50%-70% reduction in the risk of dying from any cause!
#2 Don’t let pain interfere with your ability to stay fit. Whatever you do, don’t ignore pain by dosing yourself with ibuprofen, as that will only serve to inhibit your body’s natural repair cycle. If rest and exercise hasn’t helped relieve pain, then it may be time for regenerative injections with prolotherapy. If your neck, back, knees, shoulders, fingers, and feet are in pain, treat them with prolotherapy. You don’t have to let cumulative injuries limit your activities.
#3 Eat less, live longer! Roy Walford, MD of UCLA has studied low calorie, high nutrient diets for over 35 years. He has proven that “systematic under-eating” (the practice of eating nutrient–dense low calorie whole foods) and keeping your weight just below your set point can add 20-30 % to your disease-free life expectancy. This means avoiding nutrient deficient high calorie refined foods, fast foods, sugars, and trans fats, while eating a Mediterranean style diet rich in vegetables, fresh fruit, legumes, olive oil, nuts, seeds, lean meats, and fish.
#4 When it comes to prostate cancer, prevention is the best medicine. About 80% of men will get prostate cancer before the age of 80. That’s the bad news. The good news is that more is known about the effect of diet on the risk of prostate cancer than on any other cancer. So what can you do to lower your risk? Eating just a 4 oz. daily serving of lycopene rich watermelon or pink grapefruit can lower prostate cancer risk by a whopping 50%. Other lycopene rich foods include apricots and cooked tomato products (marinara sauce, juice, catsup). Eating flax seeds can increase your intake of cancer fighting lignans more than any other food. Flax lignans are known to inhibit the enzyme aromatase, thereby preventing testosterone from being converted to estrogen. Other powerful anti-prostate cancer foods include pomegranate juice, green tea, vitamin D3 (sunlight, supplements) and soy products (tofu, tempeh, soy beans, soy milk), all of which inhibit prostate cancer growth.
#5 Manage your male hormones: Testosterone levels gradually decline as a man ages, decreasing approximately 1.5 percent per year after age 30. The effects of low testosterone include decreased muscle mass and bone density, insulin resistance, decreasing sex drive, less energy, irritability and feelings of depression.
In recent research by Molly M. Shores, M.D., and colleagues at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System and University of Washington, Seattle, men with low testosterone levels had an 88% increase in risk of all-cause mortality compared with those who had normal levels.
They studied the relationship between hormone levels and death rate in a total of 858 male veterans older than age 40 years. All participants received care in the VA Puget Sound Health Care System and were followed for an average of 4.3 years to a maximum of eight years. When the researchers considered other variables that may influence risk of death, such as age, other illnesses and body mass index, men with low testosterone levels were still 68 percent more likely to have died, and if they had other risk factors, low testosterone increased their risk of dying even more.
Other studies, including those by Farid Saad, PhD, of Berlin-headquartered Bayer Schering Pharma, have found that restoring testosterone to normal levels in testosterone-deficient men lowers these risks, and leads to major and progressive improvements in features of the metabolic syndrome. He found that testosterone treatment significantly reduced waist circumference, total cholesterol, LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, triglycerides, and body mass index (a measure of body fat), while increasing “good” HDL cholesterol.
And it turns out that frequent sex can lower prostate cancer risk by effectively “cleaning the pipes”, preventing the buildup of cancer causing hormones in the prostate.
At CTM, we have several options available for testosterone treatment. Gels are convenient, while hormone pellet implants have the advantage of lower doses providing greater benefits and preventing the conversion of supplemental testosterone into estrogen through induced aromatase activity. For more information on male hormone testing and replacement therapy with transdermal gels vs. pellet implants, contact Dr. Peterson.