4 Key Factors for a Long Healthy Active Lifespan

Let’s all aim for a long Health-span rather than a long Lifespan!

Modern medicine has focused on extending our life span, supported by the general public. This has been achieved but at a severe cost. If we look at America as a vision of where the UK follows a few years on, we should be making vital changes to the way the health care system works. 

Longevity has been achieved with ever increasing medical support, so that now the American people are the sickest people among the industrialised nations despite, or perhaps because of, their highest national expenditure on medicine.

The key question is “are we brighter than an amoeba? Every living creature from amoeba to human has the ability to respond to its environment. Shine a strong light on an amoeba and it will move away for its survival. 

We humans also have the ability to respond to anything that is a threat to life, or in other words we all have response-ability for our lives. Sadly most of us are not living responsibly, we no longer feel responsible for our own health and longevity. Many of us have handed over this responsibility to others such as a doctor, the food industry, or the government in charge of health and safety!

We all have a choice between a long active healthy life or a long increasingly unhealthy life progressively more and more inactive or disabled.

What can you do to achieve the long healthy, active lifespan?

You can start with four key factors for health promotion (in order of priority):

1. Your breathing
2. Your eating
3. Your body care
4. Your mind

Why this ordering? 

We can live our entire lives with many mental problems, we can live for years with little exercise and structural problems, we can only live for a few weeks without food and water but we can only live for a few minutes without breathing!

The other reason for this order is to make this life changing shift easier for you! You can improve your breathing in a matter of days or weeks, you can change your eating habits with a little effort in weeks or months but work on your body might take months or more and changing old established mental problems can take years of effort and good support.

Now you know how to proceed, you need some measuring tools to check your progress on this journey, both to give you encouragement and to help you direct your efforts in the most useful ways.

Based on my forty years of experience in the healthcare profession I would suggest some of the simplest yet well proven tests:

1. For your breathing I suggest the Buteyko Method “Control Pause “ – This test takes about one minute and will give you a good indication of the quality of your breathing and your tissue oxygenation.
2. For your nutritional status I would suggest the simplest test, “The 4LeafSurvey” – This is based on twelve questions and gives a good measure of the percentage of calories you get from whole plant based foods in your diet.

You now have perhaps the two most important vital signs that most doctors have neglected for half a century. The vast majority of diseases are closely related to how we breathe, our tissue oxygenation, and what we eat.

• The testing of your body can be much more complex, but as a good start to assess your weight related to your age and height, the “BMI” can be useful.
• The last but not least is the measure of your mental state. This without doubt is the most complex area but we still need some measure for this. I suggest a very simplified version of “The Luscher Colour Test”. This test was developed by Professor Max Luscher, and is based on the fact that our response to colour reflects our emotional state or mind-state.

Check your breathing, diet, BMI and mental state by clicking on the links below:

1. Breathing
2. Diet
3. BMI
4. Mind

Words: Michael Lingard BSc. DO