Friday, March 18, 2005

Lifespan

I've decided to prolong my life.
Mark tells me that happens when you have kids.
Maybe that's it - or maybe it's that I'm 35, half of our Biblical three-score-and-ten, and I'm suddenly realizing, "Holy crap! The cup's half empty."
Or maybe it's a sudden self-reprogramming. My PE coach in seventh grade told us exercise would not prolong our lives. "We have a certain genetic lifespan built in," he said. "You reach it and it's over. All exercise can do is make the years you've got better." I don't know why, but I believed him and continued more-or-less believing him up until a while ago, despite the big piles of research that suggest the contrary. One day I noticed that I believed something incorrect, and here I am.
So after a brief spate of research - research being typing various keywords into Google and seeing what I come up with - I've got my new life extension plan:
1) More antioxidant foods. I'm shocked to learn that taking vitamin supplements doesn't seem to work. At least there's no evidence that it does. So there goes my plan of eating crap food but taking lots of vitamins. So: strawberries and bluberries on cereal or for desert; skipping the Friday bagel days at work and continuing with my multi-grain cereal; eat a lot of the free fruit they have in the kitchen at work; green tea instead of coffee; red beans or broccoli or red onions with dinner; boom! Antioxidant city.
2) Less sleep. Correlation isn't causation, I know, but studies have shown that those who get six to seven hours sleep a night live longer. Can't hurt, right? Unless I get cranky. Ok, I probably won't attempt this until Sofi's sleeping more consistently.
3) Exercise. Time to break out DDR again. Question: do I buy a new Playstation or do I get the Xbox version? Decisions...
4) Vitamin C. Even though studies *haven't* shown, can Nobel prize winner Linus Pauling be wrong?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Vitamin C. Even though studies *haven't* shown, can Nobel prize winner Linus Pauling be wrong?"

Oh can he.

http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/pauling.html

m.

Jamie said...

Oh good, I don't really like taking vitamin C.