Can you imagine your toddler growing up to be 80? 90? 100? It’s not as unlikely as you think.

What a paradox. Children nowadays are purported to be unhealthy – overweight, sedentary, raised on junk food and hooked to the TV and the Internet. They are likely to develop diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. On the other hand, the same generation of children is expected to live longer than their parents and their grandparents, according to a study by German and Danish researchers. They are the future centenarians.

Which Countries Have the Highest Life Expectancy?

Life expectancy has been improving with each generation. At least in developed countries. Japan and San Marino have the highest life expectancies in the world today: 86 and 81, respectively according to a World Health Organization (WHO) report. Canada is not far behind at 80.5 years. US life expectancy is 78.5.

If this trend of improvement continues, 75% of present day children born since 2000 will reach 75, even a hundred years old. Furthermore, the senior citizens of the future will be fitter, with less disability and functional limitations.

Why Are People Living Longer?

Advances in medical treatment and better health care seem to be what is making people in developing countries live longer despite the increased incidence of chronic diseases, pollution, and unhealthy lifestyle.

With all the efforts exerted to fight aging, diseases, and disability, it is a great to know that these efforts are bearing fruit. There are still countries with a life expectancy between 40 and 50 years due to poor health care and war.

Some Downsides to Having an Older Population

Despite this apparent victory against aging, there are some downsides to consider:

• Increased life expectancy and low birth rates will result in a population dominated by retirees and pensioners. Experts believe that in 5 to 10 years, some countries’ demography will reach a point wherein there will be more 65 plus citizens than under-fives. It would be a world with more grandparents than there are grandchildren to go around.

• Such a population structure described above can result in collapse of health care and welfare systems of developed countries.

• Even if birth rates are increased, Mother Earth can only support so much. We may reach a point when our population will outgrow our planet.

Experts believe that country leaders should act now and start preparing for the foreseeable future.

Can you imagine your toddler to live to be 100? Do you want to live to be 100?

This weekend I met an inspiring mother of  an adult and it got me thinking about what kind of a mom I hope to be when my son is grown up.

The mom I met was out rock climbing. She was standing on the edge of a cliff in a state park about an hour out of the city, holding armfuls of climbing gear, enjoying the beautiful day, the beautiful scenery, and doing something she loved. She taught me to set up climbing anchors at the cliff tops, I lent her some of my gear, and we all climbed together for the rest of the day, and heard her stories about sleeping in a sleeping bag roped to the side of a cliff half-way up a mountain, and other daring tales.

Her son is in his mid-twenties, and she’d been climbing for over 30 years. Climbing is something I’m very passionate about and it was wonderful to meet someone who has kept up her passion through motherhood.

Our lives change so much when we become moms, and often many of the things we do for ourselves get lost, or there is no time to do the hobbies and interests we used to have. I hope I can maintain some of the things I’m passionate about as well as being a mother. And I hope one day I’ll be old and wise, and I can help others and share knowledge and experience as generously as the mom I met does.

Maybe my son will love climbing too, maybe he won’t, I’d love to share that with him if he does, but whatever he is passionate about, I hope that I will be as good at supporting him, and also helping him to find a balance between doing things he loves and doing things he needs to do (like school).

And when he’s all grown up, and off doing his own things, I hope he’ll let me know what he’s doing, even if it’s something I don’t understand (and it probably will – who knows what kids of 2030 will be into?) and I’m sure I’ll be very proud of him. And I hope he’ll feel that however grown up he is, that his mom will always be his mom.

What kind of mom do you think you’ll be as your children grow, and when they are grown up? How do you maintain doing the things that you love?

For another writing gig I do, I’ve been invited to interview an up-and-coming rock band. The band members are all aged 15 and looking at their photos on their MySpace page, I first thought “Aww, how cute they look” (and this is a thrash metal band) and then “I’m old enough to be their mom” and then “I feel so old!” So basically, I’m terrified of doing the interview.

Becoming a mom officially makes you a member of the generation above the one you used to be. We used to be the new generation, and now our kids are.

So I just turned thirty-not-telling-you. My boyfriend’s daughter’s birthday is the same weekend of mine so I wasn’t able to wallow in my extreme old age, instead being swamped in a sea of pink frosting, glitter gift wrap, Hannah Montana dolls and plastic jewelry and being required to help manage a large quantity of other six-year-olds at the party.

Now we are parents, we have responsibilities, we worry about our kids, we have to deal with financial issues, we have to plan instead of being free spirits. We don’t get enough sleep, we are often perpetually tired, and there aren’t enough hours in the day to manage kids and work and housework and anything else we want or need to do. No wonder we feel old.

Then again, having children keeps you young too. Little kids are the best excuse to do fun things and I think that you might be lying if you say that going down slides at the playground isn’t just a tiny bit fun.

And there’s all the giggling over silly things, and sharing their happiness when they learn a new skill, and enjoying their delight over new discoveries. I smile when I think of the amazement on Daycare Baby’s face the first time she saw a zebra at the zoo. Or how happy Toddler was when he figured out how to get his own boots on. Or when they play little toddler-baby games together (Usually along the lines of you poke me, I blow a raspberry at you, you poke me, hee hee hee hee hee!) that make them both laugh with that wonderful baby giggle.

As writer Orison Swett Marden wrote, Joyfulness keeps the heart and face young. Yes, I think it’s true – laughing with my kids is the perfect antidote to feeling old.

So being a mom does make me feel older than I think I should for my age. But it also make me feel younger too. How about you?

Before I became pregnant with my first baby at 29 it was a common occurrence for people to mistake me as being younger than I actually was.  It was the same way every time the subject of age came up when chatting with someone who didn’t know me very well.  I would tell them how old I was and they would get a quizzical look on their face and then make the declaration that I looked younger than I actually was.  I loved it.

Then came my babies.

I thought that my sleep deprivation was causing the dark circles under my eyes and the new wrinkles on my face were the result of my constant scowl from cleaning up poop and spit-up and once I no longer had to do those things the wrinkles would go away.  After all, I was still pretty young, so why should I look like I wasn’t?

Then the grays started to pop up.  My hair is straight, bordering on wavy, but suddenly these grays started popping up right in the middle of my head and they were curly. All of this happened as I was desperately trying to accept the fact that I would never get another full night’s sleep and I would never be able to wear a two-piece bathing suit because of my newly acquired stretch marks all across my tummy.

Now when I talk to people about my age there is never the reply of “Oh, you look so much younger than you are.” In fact, if I don’t look spot-on for my age, I might look a little older now.  I know that I’m going to age, but I swear that having these kids has aged me faster than I would have aged otherwise.  Or, as a university professor once warned us all in a health psychology class, “When a woman has a baby, she pays for it.”  She wasn’t talking about paying with money, trust me.

I would never trade my babies to get my young looks back of course, but I will be the first to admit that my little blessings were a huge factor in my newly aged look.

Here is another motivation to eat our broccoli!

Our immune system declines as we get older. Our body gradually loses the capacity to fight infections and other diseases. But eating broccoli might just give our failing immune system a boost.

Researchers from UCLA have found that sulforaphane, a chemical abundant in broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables may play a key role in boosting the body’s age-related immunity problems.

Sulforane induces the body to produce antioxidants that attacks free radicals which damage cells and lead to disease. Free radicals are by-products of normal body processes but they can cause tissue and organ damage, damage which can in turn cause diseases and aging.

So far, the study has been performed in mice, but other studies are already ongoing to see how the results can be translated to human use. Indeed, this indicates a window of opportunity in slowing down the aging process and the health problems ? from cardiovascular disease to degenerative joint diseases, from Alzheimer`s to diabetes to osteoporosis ? that comes with it.

The best thing about it is the fact that this antioxidant is all-natural and is avalaible from the vegetables that we can eat everyday. This avoids possible health problems unnatural antioxidant supplements might cause.

This is not the first health benefits associated with cruciferous veggies. Previous studies have reported on broccoli`s potential healing powers against bladder cancer. It is also a rich source of folate, a vitamin which help prevent health defects.

Source:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 10, 2008)

Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, 6 March 2008

Physical activity keeps you young while sedentary lifestyle shortens your life. This is the result of a UK-based study on aging. Basically, they compared the lengths of telomeres in active and sedentary individuals. Telomeres are found at the ends of a person’s chromosomes and they help protect the DNA from wearing down. They become shorter as we age so that older people have shorter telomeres than younger people.

Researchers at Twin Research Unit at St Thomas? Hospital in London found that individuals who are inactive, obese, and who smoke tend to have shorter telomeres than active, non-smoking individuals. The difference in biological age between couch potatoes and physically active people can be as high as 10 years.

This, once again, is another proof that exercise is good for our health.

Source:

Live slow die young. Nature News 28 Jan 2008.