New Year Resolutions To Get Healthy Habits?

Are You Still Keeping Your New Years Resolutions?

One week into the New Year and already some people have decided to stop exercising and are going back to their unhealthy habits of smoking and drinking. We know smoking is unhealthy – and there are ways to stop smoking, if you use the right approach. There’s no doubt about that – but what about drink?

In one study comparing the alcohol intake of older people to younger people, it was actually the older ones who drank the most – and the most regularly.  Joan Bakewell writing in the Telegraph took part in a Panorama special about the issue, and found that she herself, after keeping a diary about it, was in the upper limit for alcoholic intake, and also understood why some elderly people took to the bottle. However there is encouraging news from a different study.

Red Wine
Image:Wes Peck

In this controversial study featured in the Independent, abstainers actually lived shorter lives than even heavy drinkers.  The group of 55-65 years olds were monitored for a 20 year period, and the results were quite surprising.

The most positive figures came from the moderate drinkers who had between one and three drinks a day.  As to the best drink to have? As we covered in an earlier post – red wine has some of the best micro-ingredients that are beneficial to health including anthocyanins – a potent antioxidant that can help prevent heart disease. It also contains resveratrol that is reputed to help the immune system.  Here’s a video, produced by a Californian winery, explaining about the anthocyanins in red wine – also known as polyphenols, and how each year they are different.

 

Another Anti-Ageing Ingredient

Also this week I read an article about another anti-aging ingredient called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide or NDA for short.  In experiments on mice it turned their cells younger.

Two-year-old mice were given a compound over a week, moving back the key indicators of ageing to that of a six-month-old mouse. Researchers said this was the equivalent of making a 60-year-old person feel like a 20-year-old. Source:the guardian.co.uk

If the same effect could be applied to humans it would be quite remarkable. However human trials are still a few years away and the current costs are prohibitive.  At the moment the NDA compound would cost $50,000 per day in terms of human doses.  I think I will stick to my red wine, don’t you?