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Athletes get all the headlines when they get injured, but women are up to eight times more likely than men to tear their ACL. The looser construction of the female knee—and overall weaker skeleton—can compromise stability and predispose women to ligament tears. The injuries are also linked to hormonal changes around the time of menstruation, so female high school, collegiate, recreational, and professional athletes end up suffering many more tears than men.
Suspended by muscles, ligaments, and meniscus (cartilage), the knee is both powerful to bear its heavy load and also mobile, which makes it susceptible to jarring twists that lead to tears in the support structures. But the biggest culprit is obesity: the extra weight-bearing squashes the cartilage.
You ice an injury for forty-eight hours after an injury because of the swelling. While swelling indicates an increase in fluid or blood deposits in the area, it slows down recovery from the injury. The presence of this additional fluid makes joints stiffer and more painful, which makes them weaker. Ice reduces the swelling—and the pain. After that forty-eight-hour period, you use ice to generate heat (when you take the ice away it heats up) or heat alone on the injury to warm it up. The heat loosens up the joint or muscle, giving you more flexibility and allowing you to move more freely during rehabilitation.
Because it’s linked loosely with ligaments and muscles, your shoulder is extremely flexible. But that flexibility also makes you prone to rotator cuff tears from overextension.
Belly dancing isn’t the only thing hips are good for. Hip joints are the ones that provide the hinge for any kind of forward motion. While they’re not as flexible as shoulder joints, they’re large joints, and a lot of things can happen in there. Any chronic pain needs to be addressed by a doctor, but hip pain does not automatically mean you have arthritis. If the pain is coming from the front of the hips, in the groin area, it’s probably a sign of some form of arthritis. But if you’re experiencing some tenderness along the sides, your pain more likely stems from tendonitis or bursitis, which can be treated in a number of different ways, including anti-inflammatory medication and physical therapy.
Our strongest joint, the hip has a ball-and-socket construction that gives us stability, but at a price. The joint is difficult to stretch out and is prone to stiffening with arthritis. The effect is that your joint feels as if sand is being poured into the joint.
Cracking your knuckles makes you sound like a bowl of Rice Krispies and never goes over well in church. While it’s painful for us to hear, you’re not doing any harm to your joints, bones, or muscles when you crack—unless you feel pain when you crack them. It’s just caused by the high pressure suction of gas being expelled when your joints move apart. If it hurts when your knuckles or knees crack, you need to see your doctor to assess what kind of joint damage you may have.
For the record, osteoarthritis is only one kind of arthritis. Arthritis is the broad name given to any inflammatory joint disease. Rheumatoid and some other forms of arthritis are not diseases associated with aging, but rather autoimmune disorders, in which antibodies attack your cartilage, which is what triggers that inflammation and joint pain.
If you’ve ever strained your back, you know that on the scale of 1 to 10, the pain ranks at a 692. It can be paralyzing—making it difficult to walk, to sit, to get up, to sleep, to do anything. All you want to do is to lie down, prop your head on some pillows, flick on Ally McBealreruns, and remain still. And you can think of nothing better than having your spouse deliver ice packs, ibuprofen, and the latest issue of Tattoo Today directly to your bed. But your spouse shouldn’t play nurse. Why? Statistically speaking, married people with back pain suffer two and a half times longer than single people. Attentive spouses may be doing the right thing emotionally, but by encouraging the suffering to stay in bed, they’re doing the wrong thing physically. If you stay in bed for longer than forty-eight hours, your back muscles weaken—and can increase your risk for further injury. In order to recover from strain, your muscles need to grow stronger and stay active, and the only way

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As the heart develops in the unborn child, it takes on several distinct appearances, each resembling other animal hearts and each a step higher on the evolutionary ladder. At first, the tubelike heart is much like a fish heart. When it divides into two chambers, it is similar to a frog heart; with three chambers, a snake or turtle heart. Finally, with four chambers, a fully formed heart looks like what it is: the most highly evolved heart of a mammal. The four-chambered heart has a distinct advantage over simpler structures: It allows us to send our “dirty” blood to the cleaners—the lungs —and our “clean” blood to the rest of the body, without having to mix the two, a very efficient system. The blood coming from the left side of the heart is pure, fully oxygenated, ready to fuel the muscles; a fish heart, on the other hand, has to pump blood to the body that is only half as pure, because it doesn’t have separate chambers that enable it to clean the blood in one cycle and then distribute it in the next. Our sophisticated ticker allows us to process energy more efficiently, and therefore move farther from our energy source—we can do lots of work in between looking for food, while a fish has to live in its energy source, eating all the time. Unfortunately, this efficiency also enables humans to easily store extra energy, especially as dreaded fat.
High blood pressure, high blood sugar, the effects of cigarettes, and other factors can nick the smooth inner layer of your arteries. Your body tries to repair that nick using cholesterol as a plaster. But if the proteins carrying the cholesterol are bad (LDL), an inflammatory reaction is triggered that signals for white cells to invade the area. The resulting plaque is irritated and encourages a blood clot to form. That clot can suddenly block the entire artery—and lead to heart attack, stroke, impotence, and memory loss.
The same process that clogs the arteries of the heart can do the same to the arteries feeding the legs. The result? Leg pain when you’re walking (it used to be almost always associated with smoking, but now has other causes—all the causes that heart disease or strokes or impotence have). The cure is to adopt the Live Younger Action Plan in this chapter and to keep walking, since this exertion stimulates the body to make new paths for blood to feed the starved tissue. This “collateral blood supply” shows your body’s ability to help itself if you just provide it with the opportunity.
If you fly a lot, you should get up and walk around every two hours, or move your feet with exercises at your seat. Doing so will help you prevent a condition called deep vein thrombosis (or clotted leg vein) that occurs when you’re sitting in the same position for a long time. The danger is that without movement, a blood clot can form in the leg. That clot can then slip up into the lungs and block off their blood supply (that’s a bad thing). Walking around or rolling your feet lets your leg veins pump the blood back through your body to prevent clots. You should also take 162 milligrams of aspirin (that’s two baby aspirin or half a regular one, and a glass of water) before long flights to make your platelets less sticky and to reduce the risk of deep vein thrombosis occurring.
All of your arteries are dilated by a short-lived gas called nitric oxide. You continue to make this gas as quickly as it dissolves—unless the hardening of your arteries (read damage to that inner layer of your arteries in Figure 2.1) slows the process. Without enough nitric oxide, your arteries are unable to open up and feed more energy to your heart or your legs when you walk or exercise. So even without a literal blockage to an artery, if you have damage to your endothelium, you can still suffer inadequate blood flow to your heart or legs.
The SA node rules your heart rhythm with quick conduction to the AV node; that electrical system can be shorted out by rogue cells from other parts of the atrium and cardiovascular system, especially the pulmonary veins. The effect: irregular beats, like atrial fibrillation.
The coronary arteries, which lie on the heart’s surface, drip blood into the heart muscle. With strings attached to that muscle, the mitral valve regulates blood into the left ventricle. If those strings are too long, the valve leaflets slip too far up—allowing blood back into the left atrium. That’s a condition called mitral valve prolapse. Aortic valve leaflets can tighten and tear from wear and tear, causing leakage or, conversely, too narrow an opening.
Simply doing physical activity for twenty minutes is enough to make a difference—in your heart, your arteries, your bones, your joints, your attitude, and your whole health. To define that twenty minutes, it’s twenty minutes of sustained activity that leads to your being slightly out of breath, or enough for you to break a sweat during that time. We know that you have responsibilities to jobs, kids, and the three-foot-high weeds in the backyard, but it’s a good thing to be selfish when it comes to taking time for exercise—especially when you realize you’ll be in better shape to take care of

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We all know what happens when the power lines outside your house go down. The electricity is low, and you can’t generate enough power to work the toaster, turn on the TV, or power the hair dryer. Just in the way that low electricity levels can change many things about the way you live, so does your diet. The factors from the outside change the way you work on the inside. Depending on what you put into your body—as well as in what amounts and how often—it affects how you feel and how you live.
Now, of course, there are lots of reasons to eat—you’re bored, you’re at a party, your kid left seventeen fries on the plate. The ultimate reason to eat is to provide fuel for your body—not only to keep you lean, energetic, and strong, but also to feed your organs with the foods and nutrients that they crave to keep your entire internal infrastructure running smoothly. If you don’t understand how the body processes food—as well as all of the inner workings of your body—you can’t understand why and how food is important. Once you see how certain foods function, you’ll understand how eating them will make you feel better and be healthier—and even lose weight in the process.
A major part of this book will be our discussion about what foods play a role in the livelihood of different organs and anatomical processes, so we’ll arm you with the Owner’s Manual Diet, explained in detail in Chapter 12. We’ll provide you a ten-day, thirty-recipe plan that shows you a way of eating that’s designed for optimum health. It’s not a calorie-restricted weight-loss diet per se, though one of the side effects will be that you lose weight. Within each chapter, we’ll provide the nutrients that are best for that part of the body and the foods that contain those nutrients so you can tailor your diet to your specific health needs. Two of the differences between our diet and so many others is that it’s great tasting and it’s easy—no induction phases, no counting or weighing, no maintenance dieting. What we want to emphasize is that you can change the way your body works—and the way you feel—with the food you eat. The diet focuses on foods like healthy fats, whole-grain foods, fruits and vegetables, protein, and the many other nutrients that your body is meant to have. By following the great-tasting Reader’s Diet, you’ll feed your organs the nutrients they need to function better, to stave off disease, and to keep your body healthy.

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So far, you’ve traveled all throughout the body—darting among neurons, streaking through arteries, and wading through intestines. Now that you’ve had an owner’s view, we hope you realize the importance of everything that goes inside by understanding all the powerful effects food can have on preventing disease, on maintaining proper organ function, on helping you live a healthy life, and on keeping you feeling your best.
The Owner’s Manual Diet will help you do that: this ten-day trial of delicious foods will not only satisfy your taste buds but also please all of your body’s factories. It has more than thirty great-tasting recipes with all the right foods to fuel your body. After these ten days, you’ll have a sense of how great healthy food can taste and how little effort eating this way takes. You’ll also see how your body responds when you substitute nutrient-rich foods for the villainous ones.
Most diets, of course, focus on one number: pounds lost. Why? Because so many people are obsessed about being overweight, about fitting into jeans, about impressing the casting director. But in the Owner’s Manual Diet, we’re not as concerned about the number of pounds lost. We’re concerned about making you feel better, helping you live younger, and slowing the effects of aging. We feel it’s more important to regulate other numbers and feelings in your life—things like your blood pressure, your cholesterol and inflammation numbers, and your energy level. It is even possible to be overweight and fit if you make choices to control those things. Just to emphasize how important exercise is to health, we’ve included a Diet-Activity Crib Sheet that is just as easy to follow as the diet.
Now, it just so happens that one of the great side effects of this diet is that you will lose weight on it, because these foods contain all the ingredients important to controlling weight. Of course, it’s important to control obesity and make strides to living a healthy and active life, but we don’t want you to panic if you don’t lose fifty-three pounds in the next six hours. Even a ten-pound weight loss will have dramatic effects on your heart and blood pressure, your bones, your sex organs, and every other part of your body. And that’s what makes this diet doable for the rest of your life. And some physicians even argue that obsessing over diets, pounds, and waist sizes is bad for your health, especially when you consider the inevitable cycle of fad diets—starve, binge, starve, binge. And the stress!

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Action 2: Get Tested

It’s safe to say that by now you know one of our main mottos: Organized medicine isn’t responsible for your health; you are. You’re responsible for your own healthy destiny. You make decisions regarding your health every day (fries or baked? stairs or elevator?), and you can influence how long and how well you live. But just because we’ve hammered home that message as if it’s a box of carpenter nails, don’t discount the important advances in medicine and the importance of having your health monitored by a professional. That’s because cancer prevention isn’t the same as cancer detection. Preventing the onset of the disease is our ultimate goal, but there’s no guarantee you will. Bad luck and genes are important determinants in our lives—and our bodies as well. This is important because we don’t want you to carry guilt with disease, but rather move on and fix the problem. That said, the next best goal is early detection. Early detection exponentially increases your chance of survival when diagnosed with cancer. We don’t expect your garage to be filled with MRI scanners, syringes, or rubber gloves (unless you have a serious eBay problem), so it’s important to know the best courses for early screening different types of cancer. One important note: Our screening guidelines are for people who have average risk factors. If you have a family history—especially if you have two first-degree relatives with certain kinds of cancer—it’s crucial that you’re screened at a much earlier age (twenty-five, in some cases).
SKIN CANCER The three main kinds of skin cancer (basal cell, squamous cell, and melanoma), originate from different cell types and therefore have very different behaviors. The one that really jumps around is melanoma, which is a peripatetic cell anyway. The basal and squamous cells are limited to the outer skin, so they invade locally; these are linked to sun exposure, while melanoma—the one most associated with risk of death—is not. Basal and squamous cell are very curable cancers that are usually treated by removal of the cancerous growth. Each kind of cancer has different physical characteristics, so keep a skin journal. That is, check your skin (and have a partner do the tough-to-see spots). If you notice any changes, that’s the red flag that you need to have the blemish checked. We recommend that you get a skin screening by a dermatologist every year after age thirty. (If you’re looking for a new project for your digital camera, you could even take photographs of any marks on your skin, download the pictures, and then repeat the process every year. That’s a good way to compare physical characteristics over time.) Plus, going to your doctor with a little ammunition like serial pictures of a mole will make the physician’s decision easier, so he or she might not feel compelled to cut out every new skin change.

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