aging, elderly, time running out
Diabetes, stroke, obesity, lower back pain, hemmorhoids and sciatica -- all diseases usually found in older people -- are striking children and young adults at greater rates. Many people have the idea that they can enjoy life in their younger years, eat and drink whatever they want, do whatever they like, and not have to worry about diseases or illnesses until they are much older. Unfortunately, this mindset coupled with a plethora of toxic foodstuffs available 24 hours a day and increasingly sedentary lifestyles has led to a world full of youngsters living in elderly bodies.

When it comes to aging, is our society so far removed from what is truly healthy that we confuse what would be considered normal with what is common? Is a sick population, of both the young and the old, our destiny? On this episode of The Health and Wellness Show we'll explore this phenomenon and its causes as well as dietary and lifestyle changes to keep your innards young and supple for as long as possible.

And don't forget that pets age too. Stay tuned for Zoya's Pet Health Segment where the topic will be caring for seniors of the furry persuasion.

Running Time: 01:30:09

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript of the show:

Jonathan: Welcome everybody to the Health and Wellness Show. Today is December 9, 2016. My name is Jonathan. I'll be your host for today. Joining me in our virtual studio from all over the planet we have Doug, Erica and Tiffany. Hey guys.

Tiffany and Erica: Good morning.

Doug: Hello.

Jonathan: Morning. So we are missing Gaby and Elliot today. We wish them well. Today our topic is Aging is Not Just for the Aged Anymore. So we're going to be talking about diabetes, stroke, obesity, lower back pain, haemorrhoids, sciatica. A number of other diseases usually found in older people are beginning to strike children and young adults at much greater rates now. People generally have the idea that they can enjoy life in their younger years, they can eat and drink whatever they want, do whatever they like and not have to worry about diseases or illnesses until they are much older. Unfortunately this mind-set coupled with a plethora of toxic foodstuffs which are available 24 hours a day and increasingly sedentary lifestyles has led to a world full of youngsters living in elderly bodies.

So we want to cover that topic and we're going to talk about some of the diseases of aging which are generally referred to as such, how they are striking younger people and pass around some theories as to why that is. I think to start us off, Tiffany you had some points about what aging is, right?

Tiffany: Yes, I wanted to ask everybody what they think that aging is because when you look at a little baby and it's new-born and you come back a year later, you don't say "Oh my, how you've aged!" But you do that with an older person. So you don't age when you're a child, allegedly, but you grow up and then you have this kind of steady pattern and then you degenerate. So is that what aging is? Is aging like a physical reflection of the passage of time? But then if you consider that time doesn't really exist, what is it? {laughter}

Doug: Are you just going to stump the panel right out of the gate there Tiff?

Jonathan: I just figured it's death, right? Death is a part of life and so at a certain point it begins. I guess sometimes I've thought of this as hearing people say they have a terminal illness so now they're dying. But technically we're dying beginning at a certain point in life. You're right, there's an early point in life, where you grow up you develop into an adult at which point then you begin to die.

Tiffany: Could you even go as far as to say that you're dying as soon as you're born except that it doesn't look like dying because you have to grow up first.

Jonathan: Right, right. So there's the standard definition of aging being the decay of the body over time and certain things cease to work properly and they lose their function. It's like we have a time limit on this biological body and that's what aging is, but it's a very interesting question if you dig deeper into it. It's hard to say exactly. I remember hearing once that there's no definitive way to take a blood test or a cellular test and tell how old that person was. They can estimate but there's not a marker that says they are "X" amount of years old.

Tiffany: Like when the archaeologists go and dig up old bones and they try to age them, that's not necessarily exact. And then there's telomere testing where if you're at the end of your chromosomes, if the little caps on the end are longer then that means you're more youthful but it could just be that you're youthful, not necessarily that you're not old.

Doug: Yeah. It's not your actual age necessarily. If you've been living really hard then you're probably going to have telomeres a lot shorter than the average person of your given age group and vice versa.

Erica: And it also comes to the state of mind. You hear women especially saying things like "I'm 40 now! I'm over the hill" and identifying with that state of mind of not being as capable as you were in your 20s.

Tiffany: Well yeah, society and movies put out this thing that when you get old it's common, or normal really, not common - well it's common but they try to make it seem like it's normal that you should develop all these illnesses, like your back hurts, you get arthritis, you can't walk. There are so many stereotypical portrayals of old people on television and in movies of senile, feeble old idiots just fumbling along and you have to wonder how much of that influences how you think about what a normal, older, elderly person should look and behave like.

Jonathan: Yeah. There are certainly a lot of people who defy that expectation, like we had in our show description, the toxic foodstuffs, the environmental pollutants, the state of the world these days has contributed a lot more to that. I've also heard people say "Why would you want to go to the 19th century because you die when you're 40?" Well, there are certainly more things that could kill you in certain ways back then, like if you got a certain type of fever or an infection.

Tiffany: Mauled by a bear.

Jonathan: Or mauled by a bear. {laughter} Or shot.

Tiffany: You can get mauled by bears these days.

Jonathan: But I think that in that era, people that did live to be older had a much better quality of life than they do now in old age.

Tiffany: One of our chatters said that Eastern cultures don't see the elderly as feeble as they do in the West. It seems like in China you see all these videos and pictures of older people in the parks in the morning doing Thai Chi and Qi-Gong and all that stuff. You might have a seniors yoga class or something but it seems like definitely in the East older people are more revered and respected than they are over here.

Erica: And appreciated for their wisdom and life experience.

Doug: They're just healthier in general.

Erica: Yeah, and they don't put them away in homes. They keep them in the family as a role model and a sense of stability instead of locking them away in a home or facility as Americans do.

Doug: As an inconvenience. It seems like the aged are often looked upon more as an inconvenience in Western cultures. They don't really have a place in the average family unit. It's just the nuclear family and aging parents can be a bit of a nuisance and they need to be taken care of, stuck in a home, whatever the case may be.

Tiffany: Well now we have aging kids being sick so parents are getting it from both ends. Their parents are sick and their children are also sick.

Erica: We had an article on SOTT about the state of America's children's chronic illness. There was a statement by Harry Truman in 1946, that the nation is only as healthy as its children. In this article they talk about how 20% of US children live with chronic health conditions and it affects their daily lives and normal activities. It contributes to school absenteeism and requires continual medical attention. Some of the health problems - and we've talked about this in previous shows - the number one was ADHD which we've gone off a lot about so we'll skip that one; things like arthritis, asthma, autism is in there, but autoimmune disorders, cancer. I found it really interesting that now cancer is the number one killer of children. So it used to be accidents.

Tiffany: What type of cancer?

Erica: Leukaemia and what else? We had an article on SOTT about the number one cause of childhood death being cancer. The two things that they attribute it to, which I found kind of interesting was environmental toxins and cell phone electromagnetic radiation. They say in the article that a child in this day and age is experiencing 100,000 times more electromagnetic frequency EMF than they did in the last 100 years. So it seems like brain cancer is a big one and think about just the energy it takes to take care of a child that way. So in 2005 the US public health service estimated that cancer death rates in 1900 were about 64 per 100,000 kids and now the number has increased almost threefold to 188 per 100,000 kids. And that was in 2005! Before the show I tried to look up 2016 stats and I went onto the CDC website and they still claim that accidents are the number one cause of death for children. So I don't know if they're just not looking at it or putting it out there.

Tiffany: It's the CDC! Do you expect honesty from them?

Doug: Exactly.

Tiffany: But that is bizarre, that cancer is the number one killer of children. Traditionally, not that I'd ever consider cancer or something that normally people should get, but it's typically seen in older people. I was reading about the Gardasil vaccine and they had this FDA meeting and they admitted right there that cervical cancer is a disease of elderly women, not young girls.

Erica: Here are some more stats from this chronic illness article, that one in ten children have asthma. Again, cancer is the leading cause of death with more than 15,000 children diagnosed in 2014. Food allergies affect one in 13, heart disease is the fifth leading cause of death in one-to-five year olds!

Tiffany: What?!

Erica: ADD - we'll skip that one.

Jonathan: Are you serious?!

Erica: Yeah. That's what this says and it's all referenced here. Juvenile diabetes has increased 23% between 2001 and 2009. One in six children have a developmental disability. One in 68 children are affected by autism. I would imagine that's even more now. Epilepsy and seizures affect one in 20 children and 33% of childhood diseases are caused by environmental exposure.

Tiffany: There was a study in 2008 where they tested 6 to 19-year-olds. They looked at the thickness of the inner walls of their carotid artery, the artery that goes from the body up to the brain, and they said that more than 50% of the 70 kids that were in the study are about three decades older in their vascular age than what their actual age really was and that some of the kids in the study had triglycerides levels which were far above the healthy range and one kid's artery was so bad they compared him to an elderly man.

Jonathan: Wow!

Doug: God!

Tiffany: So is it any wonder that more younger people are having strokes than they ever did in the past.

Doug: It's interesting because there was another article on SOTT that said that stroke incidence is rising among younger adults but it's actually decreasing among the elderly. They talk about the average age of the people who are having strokes. In the percentage of people age 20 to 45 having strokes was up 7.3% from 2005 and 4.5% from 1993 to 1994, whereas with the elderly it's actually dropped by a fairly significant amount actually. In 1993/94 the average age of a first stroke was 71.3 years old whereas by 2005 it was down to 68.4.

Tiffany: I wonder why that is because it's not as if people are getting healthier, or maybe the statistics are wrong. There have been other studies that are coming out that say that ages of mortality are getting lower and lower, at least in the US, so maybe the rate of strokes in senior citizens is going down because they're already dead of something else. {laughter}

Jonathan: I have to wonder too if the statistics are transferred to something else, like we've talked a lot on the show about modern medicine and how flawed it is. However, there are medicines that do stop and prevent certain things while increasing risk for other things. There is medicine to prevent strokes. I wonder if that then increases the risk for other diseases that then cause people to degenerate so the statistic has been transferred to something else.

Doug: It's entirely possible, yeah.

Jonathan: Because I've been hearing a lot lately about Alzheimer's which is something that I was aware of tangentially, since I was younger, had heard about it, but it seems like the last couple of years I've been hearing a lot more about it. It's extremely common.

Erica: What's interesting is that they're starting to look at Alzheimer's with the whole brain/body connection too where you didn't see that 5-10 years ago. Again, going back to that quality of life and probably how you think is contributing to that or whether you do puzzles or keep active mentally as well as physically.

Doug: But, on the other side of things there was another article we looked at on SOTT that said air pollution appears to cause Alzheimer's-like brain changes in children. It was a study where they examined post-mortem brains of children and young adults that suggested that exposure to air pollution causes changes in the brain that are similar to those seen in Alzheimer's patients.

Erica: Yeah, so that's coming back to those environmental factors.

Doug: Exactly.

Erica: When you think about the small size of the body and maybe a grown adult can handle more toxicity, but a very small body with a developing immune system doesn't have the ability to ward off constant inundation of toxins in everything.

Jonathan: I hate to beat the dead horse into the ground but the diet issue I think is huge too just because it's only been 50 years, maybe 60 years where refined sugar and chemical preservatives have really dominated the food marketplace. Now is it any surprise the children are getting sick when they're young because they're raised on a high sugar diet and processed foods. That stuff is not food for the human body and when you're started on that when you're very young, the results are disastrous.

Tiffany: I don't even think we've seen the worst of it. I think maybe this last generation, maybe my generation - I forget what they call these generations now, Generation X and Millennials or Generation Me or whatever - maybe the last couple of generations we're going to start seeing that once they start getting older, just how debilitated they really are. But speaking of Alzheimer's there was an article which was pretty interesting.

They were talking about super-agers which are people over 80 years old and they had the same amount of amyloid plaques which is the sticky clumps of proteins that build up in people's brains who have the symptoms of Alzheimer's. So these super-agers have the amyloid plaques but they didn't have any Alzheimer's symptoms. So what does that mean?

Jonathan: Well they still haven't drawn that conclusion between the plaques and Alzheimer's. I just heard a show about this a couple of days ago that was a podcast where they were talking about treating Alzheimer's with light therapy and they discovered that in mice that had these amyloid plaques, through a process of experimentation they actually ended up discovering that they could treat them with a certain type of light in their eyes. There was no procedure, nothing invasive and it reduced the amyloid plaques in their brains by 50%. So that draws some interesting connections with EMF pollution and light exposure. We have more EMF pollution and less natural light exposure these days.

However, they did admit when they were talking to this researcher from MIT that they still have not drawn this definitive conclusion between amyloid plaques and Alzheimer's. It's just what they think is causing it.

Tiffany: And meanwhile the drug companies keep putting out the drugs that target the amyloid plaques and it doesn't make the symptoms better but it just makes the person sicker.

Doug: Which leads me to believe that maybe the amyloid plaques actually are a protective mechanism.

Tiffany: Probably.

Doug: That the brain is actually producing these plaques as a way of protecting the brain from some sort of onslaught. Modern doctors just look at it and go "Oh my god! The brain's loaded with plaque! That must be what's causing Alzheimer's." But it might be protecting the brain from what the actual cause is. That's purely speculation on my part.

Tiffany: Yeah, just like cholesterol in your arteries. It acts as a protective mechanism.

Doug: Yeah, exactly.

Tiffany: I think you're correct Doug. I think you should write a paper about that and publish it. {laughter}

Doug: It's called "What I Think Based on Nothing but Pure Speculation".

Tiffany: There was a book I read a while ago called How We Die. It was written by a doctor about the death process and he said he'd gone through all these studies and they did autopsies on older people who died of natural causes. They didn't die of a heart attack or stroke or anything like that and their veins and arteries were just as jacked up as people who had heart attacks or stroke and died but for some reason they passed away in their sleep peacefully. They didn't go out clutching their chests.

Erica: That kind of goes along with the author of Dead Doctors Don't Lie. We did a show on it probably about two years ago about how most people are dying from nutritional deficiencies but they don't put that on the death certificate.

Doug: Yeah! Nutritional deficiencies. No.

Tiffany: Lack of vitamin C.

Jonathan: That's an interesting phenomenon, speaking of nutritional deficiencies. I think more so in our modern era than ever in history you can have people who are obese and malnourished at the same time, which is just weird. Medically, somebody who has studied biology could probably tell me that that's not that weird, but to a layman it seems weird.

Tiffany: Most people can't wrap their heads around it because you have all this energy in the form of fat just sitting there that's not being accessed. So if you keep eating and eating the wrong types of food, your body doesn't know what to do with all that stuff so it just stores it away and keeps asking for more food, more food, but you keep feeding it McDonald's instead of giving it some lard and some healthy vegetables and meat.

Jonathan: I'm thinking of my dad as an example because when he was younger he was raised on rabbits. His mother raised food rabbits when they were kids. So essentially what he ate during his childhood, was rabbit. He was born in 1937 and he's now over 80 years old and they live in a place where they regularly get snowed in. They heat with wood and he split his own wood this year. He's doing great. Aside from a few problems like inner ear issues and stuff like that, otherwise he's fine. He just did the standard meat and potatoes diet his whole life.

Tiffany: But did they grow their own vegetables too? They didn't have GMOs I'm sure and weren't bombarded with Wi-Fi.

Jonathan: Yeah, I think a lot of that is true. I remember when I was younger we'd go out to restaurants occasionally and we did eat McDonald's and stuff like that when I was a kid, but not every day.

Tiffany: Yeah. Those were rare treats.

Jonathan: It was always home-cooked food - roasts, vegetables, stuff like that.

Tiffany: I know families who ask every day "What do you want to eat?" "Arby's. McDonald's. Taco Bell." Every day. Pizza. Soda.

Doug: So is it any wonder that extreme obesity is affecting more and more children? There was another article on SOTT that talked about how extreme obesity is starting to affect more and more kids, where extreme obesity used to be something you would see in adults. Now you're seeing it more and more in these very young children. Just to quote some stats, the kids who are being affected the most are black teenage girls, 12% of black teenage girls, 11.2% of Hispanic teenage boys and then in general 7.3% of all boys and 5.5% of all girls in the US. So it's a growing problem. I guess it just goes to show how dangerous eating these kinds of foods can actually be.

Tiffany: Yeah, if you're in America just go to Walmart and you'll see. Not to poke fun at people but it's just kind of shocking how much things have changed. When I was in high school you'd have a handful of overweight or obese kids and you see high school kids now, it looks like somebody inflated them. They look overstuffed. I don't even know how to describe it. It's just bizarre. It's bizarre that this is happening.

Jonathan: It is a distinctly American problem.

Doug: It really is.

Jonathan: Or Western, but I think mainly American. When I went to France to school for a semester in 2006 I had a check-up from a doctor there to do some of the physical sports and stuff at the school. I wanted to play soccer so I had to have a check-up and the doctor told me I was obese. I thought I could lose a few pounds but I didn't think I was obese but apparently medically I was actually obese. So it's a completely different definition of where that lies. Here in America you have to be plus-280 lbs. to be obese.

Doug: I think that also has to do with the BMI scale. With the BMI scale there's a certain contingent that it doesn't work for and I think that might be tall people because tall people can actually be the proper weight for their given category but because they're tall they throw off the formula.

Tiffany: Or people with a lot of muscle mass. Body-builders would be considered obese and they're not obese. They look like freaks but they're not obese. {laughter} I'm joking.

Erica: It's interesting how the medical establishment in the US wouldn't catch on to the whole diet thing or that they just really shy away from it in so many ways which could be, I wouldn't say an easy remedy, but something obvious, like "Hey, don't feed your kids soda and limit McDonald's to once a month" or something. It makes you wonder if this whole thing is just planned to make money. I don't have the stats in front of me but the medical expenditures are just astronomical.

Jonathan: I think that speaks to the power of the status quo and the guy who originally propagated the idea that saturated fat leads to heart disease.

Tiffany: Ancel Keys.

Doug: Ancel Keyes.

Jonathan: Ancel Keyes and how that became rooted in the modern medical establishment. When you said that Erica, I was thinking most doctors actually would say "limit soda, limit sugar, don't eat at McDonald's every day". They would probably say that but they would also say saturated fat is very bad for you. You need to avoid that.

Doug: Yeah, they just hand them a copy of the food pyramid, the dietary suggestions for Americans. You might be better off following those guidelines than eating McDonald's every day but you're still not going to be in very good shape, literally.

Tiffany: They hand out this pat advice like "Follow a healthy diet and get plenty of exercise" but they never really define what those parameters are and they work from the assumption that everybody knows what a healthy diet is and what the proper exercise they should be getting, is.

Erica: We had another article called "American Kids - Sick Is the New Normal". This was just published in December of 2016 and they talked about what we're talking about here; asthma, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in children. The author talks about these hypotheses that maybe it's too much antibacterial hand sanitizer, too many French fries or genes gone bad but they fail to consider this widespread continuation of sedentary lifestyle. Junk food and autoimmune diseases are increasingly prevalent despite few changes in sanitation norms. So we live in a cleaner environment allegedly.

But what I found interesting was they said "Fight back against the age of chronic illness" and talk about diet. The author goes on to say "Much attention has been paid to the influence of diet on gut and brain health and the importance of specialty diets reducing dangerous inflammation in the body" and then they make a recommendation saying avoid refined carbohydrates, sugar, fried foods, red meat, processed meat, and vegetable oils like margarine and trans fats and certain other fats such as lard. I thought "Wait! What?" You know what I mean? It got lumped in there instead of them doing the research that actually lard is good and our grandparents used it and they didn't have these same incidences of disease.

Tiffany: And red meat is good.

Doug: Unfortunately the common sense has been so tainted at this point that if you rely on people to follow their common-sense to get themselves back into a proper state of health they're completely lost. There is no common-sense anymore. You will inevitably end up following the food pyramid or whatever and it will just keep you in a terrible state.

Erica: Or they go the radical whole other way "We're just going to become vegetarian". Drink your kale smoothies and you'll be fine.

Doug: The thing is, they might actually improve for a little while because at least that would be getting them off all the garbage and the processed crap but unfortunately long-term that is not going to do them any favours at all.

Tiffany: Yeah, once they get over the initial hump then they start to deplete all of their resources and then it's just downhill from there.

Erica: I can speak to that personally. When I was 16, I weighed 150 lbs. and for my size - I'm a small person - I would be considered overweight and I went on the vegan diet, mainly because I worked at a vegan restaurant so it was the cool thing to do at that time. In a year I lost almost 60 pounds. So I thought "Oh, it works!" But then I started getting all these other issues, mainly chronic migraines. So I lost weight but I wasn't necessarily healthy.

Tiffany: I lost weight eating gluten, dairy, a whole bunch of carbs, yogurt, ate whatever I wanted on the weekends and I still lost 100 lbs. {laughter}

Jonathan: At one point I quit drinking soda but I was still eating everything else that's bad but I lost a lot of weight just from that.

Tiffany: I was still young at the time and I wasn't eating as much as I used to plus I was exercising. When you're young you can snap back from things a little bit easier than you can if you're older. But now we have a nation of people who are just not going to snap back. They're snapped.

Doug: Yeah.

Tiffany: And it's not just the food. I know kids that don't go outside to play at all. Maybe they'll get to go out on the playground at school during recess, but when they come home, it's television or video games and that's it.

Erica: What was that article, "Varicose veins and hemmorhoids aren't just ailments of the elderly anymore"?

Tiffany: Yeah! In young people! Not necessarily children but college age.

Erica: 20's and 30s.

Tiffany: That's still too young.

Erica: Chronic knee joint problems, bad postures, text neck.

Tiffany: Back pain and sciatica. Just those little gripes that make an older person go "Ooch-ouch" when they stand up and walk. If you're 25 years old you shouldn't be going Ooch-ouch.

Erica: This article was saying that arthroscopic knee operations were one of the five most common procedures among 16 to 25-year-olds.

Jonathan: I had arthroscopic shoulder surgery when I was 16.

Doug: I know that although the article tends to lay a lot of the blame onto the sedentary lifestyle and certainly I do think that that has a lot to do with it, but again, it comes back to diet as well. A lot of the weakening of these body systems is through either not getting the proper nutrition to fortify them or the fact that there's so much oxidation going on with free radicals coming from the diet, EMFs, chemical exposure, all these different kinds of things. Being on a high sugar diet causes free radical damage that will inflame any given tissue. For certain people it might weaken the venous system which is when you're going to see things like varicose veins and haemorrhoids. The knee joint problems or joint problems in general all come back to the dietary issues.

Tiffany: Yeah, it's all inflammation.

Doug: People are so low in vitamin C these days so they can't make the connective tissue that they need to be building things like veins, arteries and joints. I really think a lot of it comes down to malnutrition and I wonder if somebody was eating a really good diet, if they could sit around like a lump and still be relatively okay. {laughter} I'd like to see a study done. Maybe that's another study I should do.

Erica: Yeah!

Doug: Do a study where I feed somebody nothing but good stuff, put them on a ketogenic diet, lots of antioxidants in there and tell them "You're not allowed to leave the couch." {laughter} And see what happens.

Jonathan: The problem is they're going to have so much energy they would go nuts because...

Tiffany: They can jump up and down on the couch.

Erica: They'd get diagnosed with ADHD.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Doug: Yeah, exactly.

Tiffany: Well that's a worthwhile study Doug. I'll fund it if you really want to do it.

Doug: Okay.

Tiffany: I think no matter what the diet, you need exercise just to keep your muscles supple and your joints from going stiff. You need a little bit of movement. Whether you should join a gym and start doing Cross-Fit four or five days a week is another story. {laughter}

Jonathan: Yeah, a little bit is good. I think most people have had this experience where if you're sedentary for a little while and then you do 10 sit-ups, the next day you're like "Ohh!"

Erica: But you've just got to do 10 sit-ups again and work through that muscle pain and then it goes away.

Tiffany: And the thing about proper exercise - and by proper I'm leaning more towards weight lifting and high intensity interval training. Whether you're running in short bursts or riding a stationary bike in short bursts or doing anything, you should do a short burst of time as hard as you can. That actually raises the amount of human growth hormone and doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get taller just because you're exercising, but you're going to have a better ability to rejuvenate and repair your tissues throughout your life. So the higher your human growth hormone is, the better. Usually by the age of 30, in the studies that they've done, they've shown that levels are only at 20% of their peak during childhood and then it continues to decline 12-15% each decade.

Doug: I'm always sceptical about those things. I think it makes sense that HGH or human growth hormone levels would decline as you age because you need them when you're kids because you're actually growing so you wouldn't have as much as an adult as you would as a kid. But if you think about how the people that they're studying are people who are on your average standard American diet and they aren't getting a lot of exercise, when they say that normally by the time you're an aged person you don't have human growth hormone anymore, I wonder if that is just a natural result of aging or if it's because people aren't treating themselves properly so this stuff is dropping a lot and that's the average. I often wonder about that.

Tiffany: Yeah, you always have to wonder what is normal and what is common. Do we even know what normal is because most studies are done on sick people.

Doug: Exactly.

Erica: And then tested on animals.

Tiffany: Sick animals.

Doug: If you figure that the average person is eating a lot of carbohydrates, that leads to glycation and ends up gumming up all the works. Every cell ends up with a kind of sugar coating on it, or every protein has this sugar coating on it. That's going to gum up the works. That's going to affect everything, including the hormone system I guess is my point. So it could definitely lead to HGH problems.

Tiffany: Interestingly enough, there have been a lot of studies about how to prolong life. I'm still not quite sure how I feel about that personally. I'm not sure I want to prolong things longer than they naturally would go, but whatever. I'll take whatever hand is dealt me. But caloric restriction has been found to boost human growth hormone levels as well in laboratories of course, not using many humans. They use a lot of fruit flies and mice.

But they put them on calorie-restricted diets and they can extend their lifetimes to something that equals maybe 15 years in a human lifespan. That was interesting information. So intermittent fasting, periodically abstaining from food can actually boost your immune system and help keep your insides younger.

Doug: I think that's the important point, not necessarily that it's going to give you a longer life, because if you're sick then a longer life is torture.

Tiffany: Yes.

Doug: But it's the fact that it makes you more youthful in general. You could still get hit by a bus at 60 years old. You're just restricting your food unnecessarily and didn't get to bank on those 15 extra years. But the fact that it actually makes your body function better as if you were younger is what makes it the most appealing, to me anyway. And also interesting is the fact that doing a ketogenic diet mimics that fasted state. A lot of that actually comes from restricting protein. So you don't necessarily have to restrict all of your calories. You have to almost eliminate carbs basically and keep your protein at a moderate level and by keeping the protein at that moderate level state it mimics that caloric restriction even though you can load up on as much fat as you want to. So that's a way to reap the benefits without going hungry.

Tiffany: You'll be plenty satisfied.

Doug: Indeed.

Tiffany: There's this weird study that they did. The researchers took blood from 18-year-old humans and injected the plasma from that blood into 12-month-old mice. So they did this twice a week for three weeks. I just have to interject with a question. Why did they use human blood? Why didn't they use mouse blood? But anyway, after they did this, the mice became more active and they had improvements in learning and memory. They also did this other freaky experiment where they connected two mice together through their vascular system, an old mouse and a young mouse. The young mouse felt worse and the old mouse felt better.

Erica: Sucking the life force!

Tiffany: Yeah. I guess this means that there's some component in the blood or the plasma, some kind of life force as you say, that keeps people young which brings out all kinds of scary implications if you think of the old legends of vampires and the spirit cooking thing. So it's not anything that I would recommend of course, but if you are chronically ill and you need blood donations, you might want to think twice about who you're getting your blood from.

Doug: Just find a healthy person and sew yourself to them. {laughter}

Tiffany: Is that your next study Doug?

Doug: No. When I read about that I said "Wait a minute! What?!" So these people actually got funding by saying "We're going to sew together a young mouse and an old mouse and see what happens"? Something seems very sick about that, but that's just an aside.

Tiffany: Well something that's a little bit tamer, but again involving my "so how much can you apply this to humans?" is they gave them NAD and I am blanking on what NAD is. (Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide).

Doug: Nicotanic-something-or-other.

Tiffany: Yeah, look it up while I'm talking. {laughter} They gave mice NAD for just one week. They had to kill the mice so they could look at their tissues, then compared them to younger mice and they found that the old mice had tissues that compared to young mice. So this was just one week of NAD, Doug?

Doug: Yeah, it's nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide.

Tiffany: Yeah. And that boosts the workings of the mitochondria, if I remember correctly. They do sell it in supplement form. They sell NAD or NADH.

Doug: Actually reading this article made me look into this more and I ended up really going down the rabbit hole on it and it is extremely complicated. But from my peripheral investigation I would say that NADH is not the one that you want, but the NAD+ is the one that you want and I can't remember why.

Erica: Are you experiencing aging? Are you aged?

Doug: Probably.

Tiffany: A senior moment.

Jonathan: I'm curious to talk for a little bit about the social implications of the diseases of aging happening to younger and younger people. You gave that quote earlier Erica, from Truman, the idea of how our society functions when the children are becoming sicker and sicker. Lately I've been doing some reading about history during and post-WWI, before WWII happened. It was a really interesting time in the world and one of the things that's really fascinating to me is Russia. I believe during the time of Stalin, so there's no great love there for the leadership, but what the people themselves accomplished during that time was pretty incredible. They transformed their society into a fully industrialized society within the span of seven years; the amount of work that they did and the amount of stuff that they generated was just incredible.

I laugh thinking about - again I'm not making light of the Stalinist era - but what I'm thinking about is how people in America today who rail that the foreigners are taking our jobs and they're going to China and Mexico. What I think is "Do you think that America could really handle the means of production these days?" I don't think that they could because we have a population, the majority of which is ill in some way or another. Because of the amount of work that it would take to be a self-sustaining society, I don't think that the modern western population could handle it. So I'm curious about the social implications of these diseases hitting younger and younger people, that it's just going to decline from here on out because at a certain point, recovery from the state that we're in requires a healthy citizenry, which we do not have. How could we with what's going on?

So then the question becomes is that possible in the next 10, 20, 30 years? I don't know. I tend to think not. I tend to lean towards pessimism in that it's probably not possible.

Tiffany: Yeah, I think I'm with you. That's a lot of hard labour to do and if you're on all these medications and you've got doctors' appointments, you don't feel well, who's going to get out and do all the work? The only area that I see where it may have some benefit is that they might have fewer recruits for the armed services because they can't pass the physicals.

Doug: Yeah, that's the physical aspect of it too.

Tiffany: It's mental too.

Erica: We were talking before the show about how all these young children have these aged diseases and are experiencing these illnesses that you wouldn't get until you were 50 or 60 or even 70, but they're not maturing either, and we talked about that in previous shows, this "entitled" generation and precious snowflakes. What have we done? We know since our show from last week about the schooling system that it's really concerning. I work with 18 and 20-year-olds and we do physical labour, standing and working and I'm twice their age and all day long all I hear is "I'm so tired. I need to sit down." And I'm thinking what are you doing that you're so exhausted? I can't help but notice massive consumption of soda and "energy drinks" and then snacking all day long.

It's kind of a joke now. They ask "Do you even eat?" I eat before I go and I eat after I leave and for me it's concerning because as you said, Jonathan, these are the people - and I've said this many times - that are going to be in charge of everything when we become elderly and they can't make it through an 8-hour work day without complaining all day long. I have to really bite my tongue and not say "Suck it up! You're not digging trenches. You're not in the coal mines. This is a pretty cush job for the most part." So it comes back to that entitlement and then we've talked extensively about helicopter parenting. Parents don't make their kids do anything anymore. "Get out there and mow the lawn all day long!" Oh, that's too hard on them because they're sick and maybe they have asthma. Okay, so maybe mowing the lawn isn't a good thing, but there's gotta be other things to get outside!

Jonathan: Yeah, I agree with the attitude aspect of things. Whether or not people can physically handle work, they have a hard time mentally handling it as well. I'm not trying to stand on a soap box or anything. I'm not in peak physical condition but I like to think that I don't complain when there's physical labour to be done, but yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about.

Erica: And it's concerning because what the future holds all of us don't really know. If these things are stressing children out now, imagine when the world gets a little bit more harsh and you to have to gather firewood or go hunt for your food, or walk to get water.

Tiffany: I think if something that caused such a radical change were to happen suddenly, there would just be a massive die-off and the ones who survived would only be better for it because all the Wi-Fi would be gone, all the McDonald's would be gone. They wouldn't be exposed to toxic medications and medical treatments. So on the one hand it could be bad for some people and on the other hand, for the people who survive it could be kind of a blessing in disguise, if they look at it a certain way.

Erica: But all that McDonald's food would never go bad. {laughter} It would never rot or mould. But that would only last a couple of years and then that would be it.

Doug: Then what are you gonna do?

Jonathan: A situation like that is going to be bad for the majority of people I think.

Tiffany: Yes. Just the mental toll alone

Doug: Given how medicated society is.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Jonathan: It may seem kind of cold to say this but have we not brought ourselves to this point? So it's hard to say. Say you present a hypothetical scenario and you know that people are going to suffer and if you're a compassionate person then suffering of other people bothers you. So it's hard to say "You kind of had it coming". But there's objective truth and there's emotion and they're not always in line with each other.

Tiffany: And in a lot of ways, and not just people who are having health problems, just people in general, you basically get what you ask for. Whatever you continue to focus your energy and attention on and your activity towards, that's what you're going to get, whether it's something that's for your benefit or if it's not for your benefit and for the topic of this show, if you're consistently asking for - in whatever way that occurs, bad food and entertainment and laziness - you're going to reap the consequences of that. That's just how it works.

Jonathan: Whenever we get into a seemingly negative topic discussion like this, try to think about what are the possible solutions. Well we've talked about diet, that's a huge one. If you can have your children be on a healthy diet from early on, obviously that's much more beneficial and I would say at the very, very least, avoiding refined sugars and processed foods. But then for people who are adults who may have already been establishing a certain type of diet for a long time, changing to the ketogenic diet or if you don't want to go that far then at least the paleo diet paradigm is highly beneficial but it takes some work. And it's not very pleasant. The results are pleasant but the process is not very enjoyable. So it's kind of a hard sell. You're going to feel like shit - pardon my French - for a little while but you'll come out better on the other side. Quitting a sugar addiction as an adult is a pretty nasty process.

Tiffany: And also mentally - I just had a mental moment - there is this lady who did a study...

Doug: One of those senior moments now.

Tiffany: There was this lady who did a study where she got a group of older men - I forget how old they were. I think they were in their 70s and she took them off on this retreat where they had to act like they were living their lives as they were 20 or 30 years ago. They had to talk about things as they were back in those days. They had to do the same things that they did and they actually had physical changes. Their posture improved, their aches and pains went away. So a lot of this is mental where your outlook on life, how you view the world, how you view yourself plays a big part in how you age.

Erica: They called it the counter-clockwise study. It was done in 1981. So it said that by them acting younger, the men's bodies also exhibited signs of youth compared to a control group who didn't get the full treatment. So they put them back to 1959, even gave them newspapers and historical events that were happening at the time. But it said the men who were not in the control group became suppler, sat taller, showed greater manual dexterity and even their eyesight improved.

Tiffany: So that's your next study to duplicate Doug! {laughter}

Erica: Maybe that's a new theme park.

Tiffany: I want you to take us back to 1975. {laughter}

Doug: 1975?!

Tiffany: Yes.

Doug: I was born in 1975. I'm not going to remember a whole lot.

Tiffany: So then you'll be really supple. You'll be as smooth as a baby's bottom. {laughter}

Erica: It's the new reversing.

Jonathan: That totally makes sense to me intuitively because you consider the environment you have. When you have the computer, the high speed web access, the iPad, the easy access to food, very easy access to heat where you just turn up a knob and your house is warm, all this stuff is easy, then your entire state of mind conforms to that paradigm. But when you are in an environment where you have to work for things, everything about you begins to change. So if you were to put yourself, like you said, in the study in a simulated environment that was like that, I can totally see how everything about you would start to change to reflect that environment.

Tiffany: And that brings us back to the beginning of the show where we were talking about how time does not exist. So if time doesn't exist and these men are in this experiment and they start viewing themselves like they were in their 20s or 30s or however old they were supposed to be acting like they were, it can be whatever time you want it to be, kind of. I don't know where I'm going with this...

Doug: You create your own reality? I don't either.

Tiffany: Kind of in a sense. I'm not quite sure what point I'm trying to make but it's just weird to me that that kind of experiment will work.

Jonathan: I think it's a no-brainer. You can mix it up with the new agey idea of creating your own reality, but that's not entirely accurate because there's a certain element of people who think "Oh I just make everything however I want it to be". No, you don't. But you have to be able to deal with grey areas and nuances of what that means. Because for instance with pain, there's a certain amount of physical pain that you can actually think away. So what are the implications of that? If that is true, then the same thing with what you said; if you live a lifestyle and hold an attitude where you are more capable of things than you would otherwise think yourself of being, then that becomes possible. So there are grey areas in that whole "create your own reality" idea.

Doug: Absolutely. I was saying that in jest. I wasn't actually mocking it. But I know what you're saying and I think it goes back to the show we did about the placebo effect a while ago. We had lots of examples of people who were just able to take on the right attitude or get rid of stress or do something wholly in the mental realm that was able to have an effect on their physical state. So we know that it's possible. There are lots of examples of that. So maybe doing this kind of counter-clockwise study is a way of immersing somebody a little bit more in that kind of placebo state, having a lot of external factors that confirm even subconsciously - actually maybe it's more important to do it subconsciously. I can see how it works, for sure.

Tiffany: Well isn't that kind of what we're actually doing now in life? Who's to say it's really 2016? We are inside of our bodies looking out through our eyes. We're basically reading and responding and reacting to the environment. So anybody can tweak the environment and you would have internal changes. Again, I don't know where I'm going with this, but it's just weird! Because basically we are in an experiment. We're thrust in our bodies and we're forced to interact with our environment and it doesn't really matter what time it is or what time it isn't. What is now is all there is.

Erica: It's interesting, I have a 97-year-old grandfather. He's getting older and experiencing the degenerating of his body, but his mental state is still really strong and clear. When he talks about his experiences of WWII it's almost like he goes back into that time and he becomes so animated with every single detail about this, that and the other thing. I really enjoy spending time with him and he keeps saying to me "Nobody ever wants to hear about this" or "They don't want to listen" and I feel like in that moment he is experiencing that counter-clockwise reality. He has all these thoughts, emotions and experiences and it's almost like he becomes a different person.

Tiffany: Yeah, they've done those experiments in nursing homes where all they did was ask an older person what kind of music they liked when they were younger and they let them listen to it and these people had Alzheimer's or whatever and they were just sitting slumped in a chair all day and they put the headphones on them and they just became animated. If they couldn't speak before they started forming simple sentences. So it is like if you change your environment you can transport yourself back in time. I don't know how you can transfer yourself forward in time. {laughter}

Jonathan: I think that's pretty clearly proven, like you said, that that dynamic exists, that you can revert certain conditions just by invoking memories or different sensory inputs. Erica, I had a similar experience to yours with your grandfather. An older man that I know in the area whom I haven't talked to in some time, but the last time we spoke - he's probably in his late 80s, early 90s - and he's ostensibly feeble, has a hard time getting around. Where we live is an old mining town but back in the day it was booming. There was a quarter of a million people here. But when he talks about his childhood, he would wake up in the morning and the streets would be full, shoulder-to-shoulder with people at 7:00 o'clock in the morning. The bread would be baking and there would be music playing and people selling flowers in the street. It was alive and moving. And when he talks about that, bing! He's like a completely different person.

So it's really interesting to see that transformation. I have a personal theory that part of the reason that a lot of people find the turn of the century romantic - I do - and I think part of the reason for that is that era was full of much more power of life than we have now. I think now in our culture we are technologically supplemented, we are medically supplemented and we are physically degenerated. We have a lot less of that joie de vivre that they had back then.

Tiffany: How do you define power of life?

Jonathan: I don't know. I don't have an easy definition for it. I think it's when the means of living and interacting with other people and creating joy and experiences for yourself actually comes from being physically and mentally involved locally, face-to-face in the environment with the stuff that's around you.

Tiffany: An active, engaged member of your own life versus passively just accepting whatever falls into your lap or whatever people think is cool. Yeah, I know what you mean. That's good! {laughter}

Jonathan: It's hard to nail down but there's something about getting out, whether it's into the street or into the field with your animals or going to somebody's house, sitting down, making some tea or coffee or whatever, face-to-face interaction, creation of actual real experiences in reality. That creates a power of life and I think that's what we're missing now. Granted, that does exist but it's so diminished compared to what it used to be. The vast majority of interactions now are digital.

Tiffany: Yeah, and it wasn't even that long ago. I'm not that old. I'm in my early 40s, but when I was a kid we would go around to people's' houses and visit and we wouldn't always even call first. "Let's stop by so-and-so's house". "Okay."

Doug: Yeah.

Jonathan: Yeah, they wouldn't be offended that you stopped by.

Tiffany: No! That's what people did. They came a-calling on Sundays.

Jonathan: I think that we've lost a certain aspect of our culture in that regard. And unfortunately now that exists maybe in the older generation, but in the younger generation there's a weak approximation of it with what the hipsters are trying to do, by having real interactions because it's cool and ironic, but it's not real. I don't know exactly what I'm trying to say there. I know that bespoke is a buzzword and artisanal is a buzzword, but I think the reason people are drawn to those things is because it evokes a sense of that time in our culture when people interacted face-to-face and actually made real things and real experiences.

Erica: And were social animals, were used to living together in families and tribes and communities.

Tiffany: Yeah, there was more producing and a lot less consuming.

Jonathan: Yeah. It's like earlier, before Walmart. I go to Walmart, I'm not above it because it's cheap, but every time I go my mind is blown because it's like "Look at all this shit! Look at how easy it is for us to get what is ostensibly a nice chair, made in China where some poor kid was exploited to make it and now it costs me $5.00!? This is ridiculous!" The amount of easy access that we have to material goods that we are not invested in, in any way.

Erica: And it becomes a throwaway society as well. When that chair breaks, usually because it's made out of plastic, you throw it away, you go buy a new one.

Tiffany: We've become a society of throwaway people too. We're made of plastic and when we stop working, we throw them away. {laughter}

Jonathan: Exactly. Thank you for tying that back in because I feel like I'm starting to rant a little bit. But to tie it into our topic, another symptom of the physical degeneration of younger people now is also tied in with the fact that we're not involved in our world, in our reality. We siphon it off to exploited third-world countries where now the balance of involvement and the means of production is so out of whack that people are getting below subsistence wages to create goods for a society that's fat and lazy and just buys all this stuff for much, much less than it's actually worth. There should be some form of equity around the globe. The fact that it's not is creating one part of the global population that is extremely exploited and enslaved to the other part of the globe which is fat, lazy and wealthy. So what you get from a fat, lazy, wealthy culture is sick kids.

Erica: Yeah.

Doug: There you go.

Tiffany: Not nice, but true. So one final question. What would normal aging look like in a perfect world? Because eventually we're born, everybody dies eventually, or so we're told. Nobody lives forever. But there have been tales of old where people were very long-lived. I don't know what the maximum lifespan of a human is. I don't think anybody actually knows, but what would normal aging look like?

Jonathan: I was thinking about this earlier. Setting aside the idea that you could live 600 years, I don't know, is that possible? That exists in human myth, that there were people who lived that long and perhaps that was true at one point. But I think at the very least you should begin peaking in your teens, where you can actually start doing physical labour or producing things and you should then rise, perhaps your peak physical condition is from your 20s to your 30s but you actually hold an approximation of that peak physical condition into your 50s or even your 60s, at which point you're not actually considered old until you're in your 70s, 80s, 90s. Because like I said, my dad is over 80 years old and he split his own wood this year. There are people who are ostensibly "old" who are able to perform arduous physical tasks like that. And now there are a lot of people in our society who are in their 30s who can't even think about doing that.

So I think ideal physical health is that you should have some sort of peak physical condition from teens all the way through your 50s.

Tiffany: And absence of any type of chronic illness, absence of pain, the ability to maintain your mental faculties until the day you die.

Doug: If you think about it, people didn't used to retire, right? If somebody was working on their farm back in the day, they just kept working on it until they died one day and then that was it. There wasn't this slow, painful decline into uselessness. It just didn't exist. People kept on working until they died. But you can't imagine that these days.

Erica: Well now a lot of people retire and then die. They worked 30 or 40 years at the bank. They retire and then in six months they die.

Tiffany: They don't enjoy their retirement.

Erica: Getting back to our topic of last week with education and teaching in general, maybe the thing to do would be to get those people that work up until their 50s and 60s and do the hard physical labour, then they teach the youth and become mentors. I'm thinking ideally here, you know.

Tiffany: That's your next research study.

Erica: And then they teach by example and teach the laziness out of the millennials or whatever you call them, the youngsters.

Doug: Good luck!

Jonathan: Well that's the master/apprentice relationship, right? Generally archetypically the master would be quite old and experienced and the apprentice would be very young and inexperienced.

Erica: Young grasshopper.

Jonathan: Yeah right. I just want to say too, I know that we've talked a lot today about the topic of physical labour that seems to be coming up a lot but I think that that's justified in the sense that that is what propels a successful society; people who can perform the means of production of their own goods. I'm imagining in my mind somebody being like "What do you think? Everybody should just be working class and slave from morning until night?" No, not necessarily. It's just that people should be able to do that and be willing to do that. The result of the fact that we are not able or generally willing to do that kind of work has resulted in the kind of society that we see.

Tiffany: What about animals?

Erica: What about them? We can train them to do the work for us. {laughter}

Tiffany: Do they have senior moments too?

Jonathan: Totally. My dog totally has senior moments where she spaces out. She started to get bad at locating me by sound.

Tiffany: My cat too.

Jonathan: If I say her name she'll look in the opposite direction. I don't know if it's bouncing off the walls in a weird way or what but it's become more noticeable. So I think that pets do have senior moments.

Tiffany: Sometimes I wonder if my cat is deaf.

Erica: Or when you throw the ball and they look at you like "Really? I'm not going to go and get that."

Jonathan: It's interesting you brought that up because there was an Australian veterinarian who postulated that the average lifespan of a dog should actually be between 30 and 40 years.

Doug: What?!? Really?

Jonathan: Yeah.

Erica: Taking that whole seven-year per human life thing?

Jonathan: Yeah. Well the reason that it's not is because of the diet and breeding and now domesticated dogs live much, much less full lives than they actually should, an old dog should technically be 35.

Erica: That's interesting you say that because you see that so much more with dogs too, developing cancers and rare diseases before they're 10 years old and they're pretty cushioned as well.

Tiffany: Do we want to get the low-down from Zoya?

Jonathan: Yeah, that'd be a good time to do that.

Zoya: Hello and welcome to the pet health segment of the Health and Wellness Show. My name is Zoya and this week's topic is caring for senior dogs and cats. I would like to share with you a recording made by Banfield Pet Hospital that helps you understand the special health needs and considerations senior dogs and cats have.

Senior pets are awesome, lifelong companions and remember that many issues and diseases can be prevented by feeding your pet with species appropriate diet and giving them lots of love. Here is the recording. Enjoy.

Caring for your senior pet. Hi, I'm Dr. Anderson, a veterinarian at Banfield Pet Hospital. As your partner in pet care it's our goal to help keep your pet healthy and happy. Today we're going to share some information with you about caring for your senior pets.

Your pet's age is the first indicator that they're entering their golden years. Large breed dogs such as Great Danes and Mastiffs are considered seniors at six years old while smaller breeds like miniature poodles and dachshunds become seniors at around nine years. And cats are considered senior when they're 10. Just like humans, signs that your pet is aging may include grey or white on their head and face, loss of muscle mass and less get-up-and-go. You may even notice a blue haziness in your pet's eyes. This is a normal effect of aging called nuclear sclerosis. Although this does not typically affect your pet's eyesight you're Banfield veterinarian will check to make sure that any cloudiness is not caused by a more serious problem like cataracts.

Some senior pets can experience age-related hearing loss. This means that your pet can be easily startled if you approach them from behind or harder to wake from sleeping. Take extra steps to protect your pets from hazards they might not be able to hear, like children or cars.
Your pet can also learn to obey hand signals for basic commands. Some pets will start to develop masses or lumps in different areas on their body. Most of these are harmless but you should let your veterinarian know about any mass existing, or new, that you find on your pet since they could be a sign of cancer.
Joint inflammation known as arthritis can make it harder for your pet to climb into the car or jump up on your bed. They might wake up in the morning and seem stiff or become more sensitive to changes in temperature. Your Banfield veterinarian can prescribe oral pain medication to help with the inflammation and discomfort caused by arthritis.

If your pet starts to drink more water or urinate more than usual it could be a sign pointing to several disorders like diabetes, liver and kidney disease or a hormonal problem. Your veterinarian can suggest blood and urine tests to help identify potential problems early.

As your pet grows older it's very important to schedule twice-yearly check-ups with your Banfield veterinarian. These comprehensive nose-to-tail exams help identify and treat age-related issues as soon as possible to maintain your pet's quality of life. During the exam your veterinarian will also talk with you about personalized recommendations for screening tests or procedures to detect and treat diseases early, like additional blood work or x-rays.

Good nutrition is equally important for pets of all ages. Your senior dog or cat's metabolism might work more slowly. Senior diets can help keep older pets healthier and are lower in calories to help prevent weight gain. Lower protein foods can help keep older cats' kidneys in good working order. Your Banfield veterinarian can help you choose the perfect food for your pet's senior years.

Finally, one of the most common diseases we find is dental disease. It causes more than just bad breath and gingivitis. In fact did you know that 78 percent of dogs and 68 percent of cats over age 3 show signs of dental disease and older pets have a much higher occurrence of dental disease. If it's not treated, dental disease can lead to painful infections, tooth loss and serious illness in other parts of your pet's body like the heart and kidneys. So you can see why twice yearly oral exams are so important. And just like us, our pets need annual dental cleanings as prescribed, to stay healthy.

Thanks for listening. Remember, you know your pet best and we know how to help you keep them healthy. For more information on this and other pet health care topics, visit banfield.com.

Jonathan: Healthy, healthy goats.

Tiffany: Yeah. My cat is way overdue for a check up. He's an octogenarian.

Jonathan: Well thanks Zoya. So I guess to wrap up our show today we had discussed a recipe and thought it would be funny to do dry-aged steaks. It's pretty simple. It's not like some of the other things we've talked about in the past for the recipe segment. It's more of a technique and less of an actual recipe per se.

So if you take a steak that you get from the store, you can really do this with any cut, but it works best with rib eye or a New York strip or something like that. Put it on the counter in a bowl or on a plate and salt it pretty heavily. You really want to get it completely covered in salt and let it sit for about an hour and you'll see that the salt draws a lot of moisture out of the meat at which point when you see that there's a pool of the water that's been drawn out of the meat, take it up and rinse the salt off and let it drain again from the rinsing, so that that moisture comes off, and then pat it dry. You clean the salt off because if you leave that on it will make it impossible to eat later on. It will be too salty.

So then you get it dry. This works best with a vacuum-sealed bag but you can also wrap it up really tight in some kind of a wrap or you can coat it in lard and then wrap it up really tight; basically anything that prevents oxygen coming into contact with the meat is what you want to go for. So you get it sealed in some fashion, whether it's through the vacuum bag or with fat and some other kind of wrap and then put it in the fridge.
As long as it is properly sealed, not in contact with the air, you can let that sit in your fridge for up to a month at which point you take it out and cook it like any other steak. What that does, is over time the juices in the meat that are left, move around within the meat while it's sitting there and actually loosen the fibres, the connective tissues so that you end up with a really tender, flavourful steak when you do cook it.

So that's basically the process of dry aged steak. You do want to be very careful. Absolutely make sure that it's totally sealed from coming into contact with any kind of air because that's the important part because otherwise it will rot. You don't want to go 60 or 90 days with it. Maybe you could, but I've never tried that. Usually 30 days is a good amount of time. So if you have the patience and a couple of extra cuts of meat, I'd say try it out.

Doug: It sounds really good.

Jonathan: And then you have the pleasure of making a dinner for yourself that would cost you $60 at a restaurant or food establishment. Well that's our show for today. Thanks everybody for tuning in. Please tune in on Sunday at noon eastern time. Check out radio.sott.net for the radio show and we will be back next week with another topic. We have some surprises coming up which we will not tell you about because they're surprises. Be sure to check into the show and see what we have coming in the next couple of weeks.
So we'll see you next Friday.

All: Good-byes.