Ghost of Igloi wrote:
Makes you wonder for sure. One of the best M65-69 year olds in Idaho just had a pace maker installed and he is done with competition. Lost one college teammate to cancer and several others hit with cancer bouts of various types, others with heart disease. I never used Round Up however I have removed lead based paint, not professionally but as a Saturday warrior. One would like to think a healthy lifestyle would otherwise build some defense against disease, but who knows?The diagnostic tools are better, which has shown my disease is far more complicated than originally thought. Sill there are no markers that say who will get the disease but co-morbidities seem to predict trouble ahead.
IMO, it depends what that healthy lifestyle is in terms of nutrition. Excercising and eating good isn't enough isn't enough for us aging folks. Avoiding toxics in the air, food & water are the key to keeping the immune system healthy. People forget we have an immune system with Natural killer (NK) cells that are designed to stop the initiation & promotion of cancer cells.
Look at all the chemicals in our food; pesticides in non-organic food, GMO foods, dyes, high-fructose corn syrup, growth hormones & antibiotics in animal proteins. And if you eat animals that eat non-organic feed that's just as bad, i.e. you are what they eat. GMOs have been shown to cause cancer and wreck havoc on the immune system. Same with pesticides. Non-organic meat, particularly the processed & packaged meats, are linked to a big increase in GI cancers. Our tap water is full of fluoride & heavy metals. If you live & train in a large metro-area there's air pollution to breath throughout the year. Plus, add in the exposure of high-radiation CT scans that more & more older people are getting these days (ionizing radiation breaks DNA strands) plus some of the pharmaceuticals that older people have/want to take regularly (renal/liver toxicity) and you have recipe for disaster on the immune system.
About 15 yrs ago when I was in my mid-40s, I started getting sick a lot and just not feeling very well most of the time, despite excercising regulary (40 mpw & strength training 3 x week). After about a year of this, I ended up in the ER one day with severe gastritis and was later diagnosed with some pre-cancerous GI pathologies. I was eating what I thought was healthy with a lot of fruits & vegetables but were non-organic. I was also eating a fair amount of non-organic animal proteins, eating fast food two or three times a week and drinking a lot of sports drinks loaded with dyes & high-fructose.
The doctors wanted to treat my conditions with pharmaceuticals, which of course is the medical system's MO; only treat the symptoms. And when I developed side-effects from some of the drugs they assured me that had more drugs to effectively treat those side-effects. Unfortunately, most doctors know very little about nutrition. If you ask them how much nutritional science they've had in med school they will tell you very little. However, all doctors do encourage good eating habits but I'm not sure if they really know what that means.
Anyway, not wanting to be on several meds indefinitely and still feeling lousy, I completely transitioned to all food sources organic. The types of foods and beverages never changed including the animal proteins - everything was now organic. After a few months I felt fantastic, and to my GI doctor's surprise reversed all the pre-cancerous pathologies. And no more meds. ? And other than using an albuterol inhaler for EIA (can't move yet from the metro-area) and some Tylenol during the week (mild OA in 3 joints and some chronic running-related injuries), I let food be my medicine.