Lifestyle vital to healthy ageing says study

Late-life dementia has a lot in common with heart disease - and many of the same causes, according to an article published today in Nature Reviews Neurology.
Like heart disease, the cognitive decline that accompanies ageing is usually the result of a combination of lifestyle and other factors, the article says. Diabetes, obesity, untreated hypertension, sedentary lifestyle and stress are all linked to both heart disease and dementia.
Other factors linked to dementia include untreated obstructive sleep apnoea, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, vitamin B12 deficiency, post traumatic stress disorder, head trauma, brain injuries caused by a lack of oxygen and the ApoE, or Alzheimer's, gene.
Lead author Dr. Majd Fotuhi says the latest research shows dementia can be delayed, stopped and sometimes even reversed with lifestyle changes. He estimates only a fifth of late-life dementia is the result of Alzheimer's.Eating red meat — any amount and any type — appears to significantly increase the risk of premature death, according to a long-range study that examined the eating habits and health of more than 110,000 adults for over two decades.
For instance, adding just one 3-ounce serving of unprocessed red meat —  a piece of steak no bigger than a deck of cards — to one's daily diet was associated with a 13% greater chance of dying during the course of the study. Even worse, adding an extra daily serving of processed red meat, such as a hot dog, sausage or two slices of bacon, was linked to a 20% higher risk of death.
"Any red meat you eat contributes to the risk," said An Pan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and lead author of the study, published online yesterday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Crunching data from thousands of questionnaires that asked people how frequently they ate a variety of foods, the researchers discovered that replacing red meat with other foods seemed to reduce mortality risk. For example, eating a serving of nuts instead of beef or pork was associated with a 19% lower risk of dying, choosing poultry or whole grains as a substitute was linked with a 14% reduction in mortality risk; low-fat dairy or legumes, 10%; and fish, 7%.
Previous studies have associated red meat consumption with diabetes, heart disease and cancer, all of which can be fatal. Scientists aren't sure exactly what makes red meat so dangerous, but the suspects include the iron and saturated fat in beef, pork and lamb, the nitrates used to preserve them, and the chemicals created by high-temperature cooking.
Among the 37,698 men and 83,644 women who were tracked during the study, as meat consumption increased, so did mortality risk.
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