How relevant is your personal appearance, the way you appear to others, as a measurement of your true biological age? Your own evaluation, being subjective, doesn’t count for a lot, nor does the opinion of anything less than harshly honest friends. I have a primary care doctor and a cardiologist who both tell me my biological age is ten years less than my chronological number, which is 83, but I also have a pal named Gina Hawkins who told me at age 82, “No, I’d say 77, not ten years.” Don’t ask Gina any questions unless you want an honest answer. Ms. Hawkins, by the way looks about 50 but she’s really 12.
Our biological age, influenced by everything from environment to diet to exercise habits, reflects the health of our cells and organs and can differ from our chronological age by years. There are internet factions out there who can tell you for a large price what your biological age is just by examining a blood sample, or so they say. But what if it turns out that a precision 3D image of your face might be worth a thousand blood tests, that those full cheeks and undereye bags are not just unsightly but also an accurate reflection of our health?
A Peking University researcher named Jing-Dong Jackie Han has developed a system she claims will determine a person’s physiological age…a sort of heat map of the face indicating how an average woman’s face changes with age. Inspired by centuries-old Chinese practice in which practitioners divine a person’s health by “reading” their face, Han, a computational biologist, and her team constructed their clock by analyzing 3D facial images of approximately 5000 residents of Jidong, China. The researchers created two AI-derived clocks, one that predicts chronological age and another that predicts biological age. These facial clocks track the changes that visages undergo in time, watching eyes droop, noses widen, jowls sag and the distance between the nose and mouth increase. With Han’s tool, physicians could track and manage the care of patients undergoing onerous treatments known to prematurely age people, like chemotherapy. And it has the potential to aid research into aging, as well. Doctors could also incorporate Han’s work as one of the panel of tests included in a patient’s annual physical, like cholesterol tests or blood pressure measurements.
On the other hand, they could just ask Gina.
The Incredible Shrinking Bill
I went to a new doctor the other day and my height was measured for the first time in centuries. At my U.S. Army physical at age 18, I was a reasonable 5-11 3/4; sixty-five years later I am a mere 5-10, according to my physician’s nurse. “There must be some mistake,” I told her. “Nope, no mistake,” she assured. You’re just shrinking like everybody else.” Turns out men can lose an inch between the ages of 30 and 70 and women can lose a startling two inches. After 80, it’s possible to lose another inch regardless of gender. After age 90, you may disappear entirely. The cartilage between your joints gets worn out and osteoporosis causes the spinal column to become shorter. Even worse, you lose lean muscle and gain fat, a condition called sarcopenia. Early on, you can take a lot of calcium and vitamin D to slow this shrinkage down, but once you shrink, you’re shrunk. This is all very depressing because Randy Newman once had this to say about short people:
“They got little baby legs and they stand so low
You got to pick ‘em up just to say hello.”
Although you can’t gain back height, there are things you can do to slow down shrinkage, including weight-bearing exercises that use your legs and feet to support your weight. Running, jumping, hiking, brisk walking, jumping rope, climbing stairs, dancing and tennis put stress on your bones that signal your body to add new cells to strengthen them. A study published in Gerontology found that people who did moderate aerobic exercise throughout their lives shrank less than those who were sedentary or stopped exercising after age 40.
Back stretching exercises target back muscles for increased flexibility and range of motion in the joints. They also help you stand up straight and improve your posture. Regular yoga or Pilates practice daily will also help. For desperate cases, of course, there is always the medieval torture device called The Rack, once used in the Tower of London. Difficult to find in contemporary retail shops, this device allows a stretchee’s wrists and ankles to be tied to the machine by trainers, who will then pull on ropes to elongate the body, hopefully without dislocating too many joints. Think glorified taffy-pulling machine and you’ve got it.
Then again, there are many benefits to being short. You can climb through your door transom when you forget your keys. The amusement parks won’t allow you to go on those terrifying thrill rides with the kiddies. You can get in the theater for child’s prices and order from the kid’s menu at Chuck E. Cheese. More leg room on airplanes. And best of all, there are no tall jockeys so opportunities abound. Every cloud has a silver lining. John Milton, a short guy, said that.
Fat Stuff
Political correctness has taken a lot of the zing out of life. Take “body-shaming,” for instance. When we were children, everybody could punk fat kids like Paul Brooks, who looked like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. Paul, content with his role as court jester, just laughed, picked up his helmet and jogged---slowly---out to his offensive line position, where he pancaked everyone. Jimmy Lavery, a thin kid, used to call my sister Alice, who was pleasingly plump, “Crisco—fat in the can.” She took slight offense, but also took another look in the mirror and made renovations to the caboose, which gained her admirers. Now, of course, a squad of PC vigilantes will grab a fat critic up and place him in stocks in the town square for hinting that Kelly Clarkson might be slightly overweight.
We’re not talking merely a little heavy here. There are Olympic athletes and Triathlon competitors who fit that description and they’re in better shape than the rest of us. We’re talking fat-lady-in-the circus size, floor-rattling weight, scare-the children circumference. We’re talking dead-by-40 size, emergency room on your speed dial heft. Yeah, we know---some of you are already looking for the unfriend button. Many people weren’t too crazy about what Dianne Sylvan had to say, either. The ones who listened, though, are still alive.
Dianne wrote a helpful essay called “Ten Rules for Fat Girls,” full of practical and philosophical advice for obese women, explaining how to get by in a world full of the particular challenges that a larger body might pose. She was promptly excoriated by the citizens of PC Nation for providing her tips for survival. Many of her critics apparently found joy and comfort in their overlarge and unhealthy bodies, some to the point of actually glorifying fatness. In a nation known for wretched excess in gun ardor, nihilistic politics and automobile accident insurance rewards, is it any surprise there is actually an organization called the Fat Acceptance Movement, which will brook no overweight talk? What does a discreet physician say to his triple-x-sized patient these days? “You’re doing great, George, but you might want to cut down to three boxes of Dunkin’s a week for the next couple of months.”
Everybody remembers Kate, played by Chrissy Metz, from the television program “This Is Us.” She ballooned up from super-fat to ocean-liner size before our very eyes while the show’s sympathetic writers came up with every excuse in the book for her risky behavior. Chrissy had fan clubs everywhere delighting in her enormity while the rest of us winced and hoped for an unlikely Frank Merriwell finish or that at least someone would tie her down so she didn’t go floating out over the Atlantic and get shot down by the Royal Bermuda Home Guard.
If you’re irked with us for bringing up the subject, too bad. We lost one of our best friends, 350-pound thoroughbred trainer Buddy Edwards, in his early forties. Several other heavy hitters drifted into Diabetes and disappeared. Bariatric surgery? Please! They wouldn’t hear of it. Too messy, and afterwards you have to eat like a bird. The last thing any of these people need is a round of applause from a misguided Fat Nation. Instead, let’s take a look at the latest weapon against gross obesity.
Endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty is a newer type of minimally invasive weight loss procedure. There are no cuts with ESG. Instead, a suturing device is inserted into the throat and down into the stomach. The endoscopist then sutures the stomach to make it smaller. If you have a body mass index of 30 or more and dieting and exercise haven’t worked for you, this procedure is a viable option, reducing the risk of complications and allowing a quick return to daily activities. If you, like most people we know, would rather not succumb to heart disease, stroke, high cholesterol levels, joint pain caused by osteoarthritis, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, steatohepatitis, sleep apnea, or the Aggravatin' Isolatin’ Deprivatin’ Diabetes Blues, you might want to take the cure and change your life in a healthy heartbeat. It’s great to be phat. It sucks to be fat.
The January Alcohol Diet
“First you take a drink. Then the drink takes a drink. Then the drink takes you,”---F. Scott Fitzgerald
Every year, millions of people across the world give up alcohol for a month. The phenomenon which started as Dry January seems to be growing. In 2023, one out of every seven adults in the United Kingdom took part in Dry January while 35% of adults in the United States planned to give up alcohol for a full month to assay the benefits. “The effects are going to be different for different people, of course, depending on how long and how much they’ve been drinking,” says Shehzad Merwat, a gastroenterologist at UTHealth Houston. But the 30-day layoff can be a revelation even to light consumers of alcohol, who often feel better after even a couple of weeks of abstinence.
“Blood alcohol levels are a major factor in damage to our organs,” claims Paul Thomas, a researcher at Auburn University, whose work focuses on the subject. “The liver breaks alcohol down into a less toxic form so that it can be eliminated by the body. During this process, alcohol is first broken down into acetaldehyde, which is highly toxic and a known carcinogen. Typically, acetaldehyde gets broken down quickly, but if the process is delayed or disrupted by high alcohol levels or any other underlying factor such as medications which interfere with liver metabolism, then it can build up through the body, causing considerable damage. How long the toxic molecules are being accumulated in the cells and tissues determines the degree of damage.”
Damage can have a negative effect on all organs of the body, instigating health risks like high blood pressure, heart disease, liver disease and increased risk of developing certain types of cancer. Chronic alcohol use can also weaken the immune system and impair the proper functioning of the brain.
“Even in light drinkers, you can have noticeable health effects when you stop drinking alcohol for a month,” attests Carrie Mintz, a psychiatrist at Washington University in St. Louis. “You can really see the changes as early as a month after abstinence begins. This includes in the liver, which can start to reverse the damage done in most of the four stages of alcohol-related liver disease. For all but the final stage, the liver can heal.”
In addition to benefits to the liver, giving up alcohol can result in a wealth of other health benefits. In a study that followed 94 moderate to heavy drinkers who gave up alcohol for a month, participants experienced improvement in insulin resistance, blood pressure and weight compared to their peers who did not abstain. Some of the other benefits of giving up alcohol include improved sleep, enhanced mood, a decrease in depression and anxiety, better skin and a healthier gut. Alcohol has been shown to disrupt the microbial composition of the gut, a condition called dysbiosis, and cause damage to the cells lining the gut, which can cause contents of the intestine to spill over into the bloodstream. Yuck.
Giving up alcohol for a month has the benefit of helping people understand how their consumption habits are affecting their health and well-being, giving people the opportunity to untangle whether alcohol is causing or masking their health issues. “It’s sometimes hard to realize when you begin to slip into a health issue from drinking,” says Steven Tate, a physician at Stanford who specializes in addiction medicine. “Tricky also to know where that addiction line is…most people don’t realize it until they’re already across it.”
One month, no alcohol. A snap for some, a rocky road for others. Any takers?
That’s all, folks….
