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You already know to brush your teeth with fluoride which help kill bacteria, but you also can live a lot healthier by hanging out just a little longer in front of the mirror.
FLOSS Do it every day. It breaks up the more than five hundred kinds of bacteria that live in plaque between your teeth and helps reduce the inflammation associated with gum disease. (One note: It’s normal to bleed when you floss after a long layoff, but if you still bleed following each floss after a week, it’s probably a sign you have some level of gingivitis.) This is important. Brushing and flossing every day combined with seeing a dental professional every six months or so can have an effect of making you up to 6.4 years younger. Because of its ability to decrease inflammation in your gums and subsequently in your arteries, flossing will help you keep your heart pumping and your sex life thriving—not to mention your teeth intact. Pressed for time? Then follow this rule: Floss only the teeth you want to keep.
Another way to thwart inflamed gums: Eat fibrous foods like apples, or chew sugarless gum, which helps build up saliva. That helps you avoid dry mouth, which is a common cause of gingivitis.

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Look, when it comes to health, nobody’s perfect. But what’s our goal here? To improve your health, and to keep you young and active. So let’s say your overall digestive health ranks a 4 on a scale from 1 to 10; you don’t have to get to a 10 to live better. An 8 would make your insides feel as if they’re getting a Swedish massage. And you’ll live longer and better because of it. If you’re bothered, nagged, or even just mildly irritated by occasional rumblings in your gut, one of the best things you can do for your health is play mad scientist for a couple weeks. We don’t know about you, but we always loved science lab. Mix and match ingredients, and you’ll come up with the coolest concoctions that are customized to the needs of your body.
Since food has so much of an influence on our digestion, it stands to reason that you can change the way you live and feel by figuring out the foods that are causing you trouble. Since there are so many foods to choose from, the best way to experiment is through the food-elimination test (no, you won’t be looking in the toilet again). In this test, you completely eliminate one group of foods for about three days in a row. During that time, you should take notes about how you feel with regard to energy levels, fatigue, and digestive regularity. Take notes when you go off foods and—just as important—how you feel when you reintroduce them into your diet. That way, you’ll be in tune to those things that make you feel worse once you start eating them again. Here’s the order of groups of food we’d suggest you eliminate from your diet at different times, just for two or three days:
wheat products
dairy products
protein
carbohydrates (including sugar)
fat
artificial colors

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Watch any hot-dog-eating contest and you know that there are as many eating styles in this world as there are actors waiting tables in Hollywood. You can have a positive effect on your health by making some subtle changes not just with what goes into your mouth, but also with how you put it there.
AVOID LATE MEALS If your idea of late-night entertainment is a party with a bowl of Lucky Charms, switch to lifting weights while watching Leno or Letterman (see Chapter 4). Lying down so soon after eating encourages the flow of acid back up your esophagus so you get that burning taste, which will intensify the symptoms of GERD. While you’re at it, avoid GERD-promoting items like foods or beverages containing pepper or peppers, caffeine, and alcohol. Some pills can also cause GERD if you don’t take them with water (these are individual to the person).
BUY NEW DISHES Eat on nine-inch plates instead of traditional thirteen-inch dinner plates. Research has shown that the visual effect of eating is a powerful signal to your stomach to slow the digestion process. People who eat meals from smaller plates consume fewer calories—but still have the same feeling of satiety as people who eat off larger dishes. Finally a case where size matters, and smaller is better. Reducing portion sizes also has the effect of making you up to 3 years younger because it helps reduce arterial and immune aging.

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Depending on where you live, you can keep your home secure in many ways. Some apartment buildings use doormen. Some houses have fences. Got a castle? One moat and an arrow-flinging army, please. Or you can choose other typical home-defense mechanisms, like deadbolts, electronic security systems, or a frothing pit bull named Rocco. No matter what your barrier method, there’s a reason why you punch in a pass code, chain the door, or opt against neutering Rocco. You want a top-notch security system to protect all the valuables inside your home—from photo albums and stereo equipment to heirlooms and children.
All throughout your body, you also have your own security systems to defend your body against intruders. Skin and bones protect your internal organs in car accidents and from errant golf balls, hair protects your scalp from UV rays, and eyelids protect your eyeballs from finger-poking friends. But the most important security system in your body is the stealth one—the one that you can’t see or feel, but the one most responsible for protecting you from invading illnesses and for helping you recover from them.
You use your immune system every day, though you may not even know that it’s working or how it works. Your immune response kicks in when it senses something evil lurking around your body, like bacteria or viruses. When you consider the fact that your hand alone may contain germs numbering 200 million (the U.S. population in the late 1960s), it’s likely that your body is infected with bacteria right now, and the cells in your immune system are currently working their little fannies off to fight them.

Perhaps the reason why immune diseases are so complicated is that there’s such a wide range of things that can cause infections in our bodies, so many ways our bodies respond to them, and such difficulty figuring out how to beat them. While it’s easy to know when to stitch a cut or place a cast to stabilize a broken bone, immune problems have a wide range of solutions (medications work for some and not for others, for example). And that makes your immune system one of the more complex ones in your body.

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Action 5: Spend 120 Seconds at the Sink
You already know to brush your teeth with fluoride which help kill bacteria, but you also can live a lot healthier by hanging out just a little longer in front of the mirror.
FLOSS Do it every day. It breaks up the more than five hundred kinds of bacteria that live in plaque between your teeth and helps reduce the inflammation associated with gum disease. (One
note: It’s normal to bleed when you floss after a long layoff, but if you still bleed following each floss after a week, it’s probably a sign you have some level of gingivitis.) This is important. Brushing and flossing every day combined with seeing a dental professional every six months or so can have an effect of making you up to 6.4 years younger. Because of its ability to decrease inflammation in your gums and subsequently in your arteries, flossing will help you keep your heart pumping and your sex life thriving—not to mention your teeth intact. Pressed for time? Then follow this rule: Floss only the teeth you want to keep.
Another way to thwart inflamed gums: Eat fibrous foods like apples, or chew sugarless gum, which helps build up saliva. That helps you avoid dry mouth, which is a common cause of gingivitis.
SCRAPE BY Many bacteria don’t just hang out between your teeth; they lounge around on your tongue, too. Use a tongue scraper or brush your tongue while brushing your teeth to help remove some of the bacteria that causes bad breath.
SMILE Look at the front of your teeth. If they’re flat (teeth should be like your nails—higher in the middle than the sides), it’s an indication that you’re clenching your teeth at night, which makes you more prone to TMJ disorders. Why? Think of your jaw as a three-legged stool with one of the legs being your front teeth and the TMJ on either sides being the other two. If you grind down your teeth, you shorten a leg and throw off the balance of the stool—and that causes jaw pain and headaches. To help ease the stress of the joints, take a cork from a wine bottle and hold it lengthwise between your front top and bottom teeth (without the bottle, Slugger). Now relax your jaw and mouth muscles around it for at least a few seconds (or forever is good). This helps ease some of the tension that’s built up from clenching and misalignment.

Action 6: Clean Up
Dirt is good on construction sites and baseball uniforms, but it’s generally not so great for your health. These two methods will help your bottom line.
STAY CLEAR OF TOXINS Anybody who’s had a bad piece of meat or fish that led to a one-night stand with a toilet knows all too well the typhoon that swirls in your digestive system from a bad case of food poisoning. Responsible for twenty-five hundred deaths every year in the United States, food poisoning—caused by the invasion of foreign bacteria in your system—usually manifests itself with vomiting, diarrhea, and your promise to swear off the culprit forever. One way to avoid it is to make sure your food reaches the temperature of 165 degrees on the inside for at least fifteen seconds. (You’ll need a food thermometer to confirm, since oven temperature doesn’t correlate to the inside temperature of meat or fish.) Just because food isn’t red or pink on the inside doesn’t mean it reached the temperature, either.
Also throw away your sponges. A sponge is like the back row in study hall—it attracts all the bad elements. In fact, bacteria grows on sponges, so every time you use one, you have the potential of passing bacteria from sponge to dish to food to mouth to one nasty day in the restroom. Instead, buy ten cheap dishcloths and get two buckets. Put clean cloths in a clean bucket. When you need one, take one from that bucket, then toss it into the second bucket, which should contain diluted bleach, after use. That bleach will kill anything that tries to grow. Then wash all of them once a week. (Though throwing them away is the best solution, you can also wash sponges in the dishwasher or nuke them in the microwave to kill bacteria.) And, of course, you already know not to leave Aunt Mae’s macaroni out in the sun, because sun grows cultures of bacteria that secrete toxins. And that won’t taste good, no matter how much relish she uses.

WIPE WET In Western culture, the theory goes, a man shakes with his right hand so he can’t use it to grab his sword. You know what Eastern culture says? We shake with the right because we know darn well you just wiped yourself with your left. Besides Pilates, the best thing you can do for your bottom is to buy wet wipes. Why? If you accidentally got feces all over your hand, would you wash it off or wipe it off with dry toilet paper? Exactly. You’d run over to the sink faster than a sprinter in an Olympic qualifier. So why do we wipe ourselves with dry, sandpaper-like toilet paper after we go the bathroom? It’s also not the right cleaning system because it’s irritating and increases the likelihood of getting hemorrhoids. While we’re not recommending you install a bidet, you can get the same effect by simply wetting toilet paper in the sink before using it, or using disposable wet wipes that are small versions of the ones you use on babies.

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