Are you looking for ways to get healthy and peel the years off your body? Dr. Oz and Dr. Roizen are back with the ultimate anti-aging checklist. Don't wait until you're falling apart—change the way you look at life and start your path to better health today!
Barbara (on the left) is 60, but her body is much younger. After 22 years of yoga, regular belly-dancing classes and her passion for reading and writing, Dr. Roizen says Barbara's "real age" is 48.
Sandra (in the middle) is 63, but her "real age" is just 50. Dr. Roizen says that through meditation, plenty of sleep, a balanced diet and making time for her passion of riding horses, Sandra has shaved 13 years off her calendar age. Finding that passion in your life is hugely important in staying young, Dr. Roizen says. "It's about an 8-year effect," he says. "It's a major factor."
Unlike Barbara and Sandra, Laura (on the right) is not living a healthy lifestyle. She smokes, doesn't exercise and doesn't deal well with her stress. She is 44, but her "real age" is 60. "Temporarily," Dr. Roizen says. "You can still get younger—that's the good news."
The first step is to make the changes on this checklist. "The things we'll show here, just in the right amounts, can take a dramatic amount of aging off of you," Dr. Oz says.
Your change to a newer, healthier life starts in your refrigerator. The first thing you need in there is plenty of foods rich in antioxidants.
But what are antioxidants? Why are they so good for anti-aging?
To explain, Dr. Oz compares apples to apples—one half of this apple was sprinkled with lemon juice and the other was not. While the lemony half remains new and crisp-looking, the untreated half becomes brown and shriveled because of exposure to oxygen, also called oxidation. "The same thing happens to our skin, to our heart, to our eyes," Dr. Oz says. "All of our bodies need to have the antioxidants."
As their name implies, antioxidants do to your body what the lemon juice does to an apple—help prevent the damage caused by oxygen exposure.
While lemons do have some anti-aging benefits—similar to onions—Dr. Oz says there are several foods that are much more potent.
Dr. Oz says one of his favorite anti-aging foods are blueberries. You can tell blueberries are chockfull of antioxidants because of their dark color. "All foods with dark colors in them have some of these really protecting antioxidant chemicals in them," he says. "Blueberries lead the charge."
Other good anti-aging foods include sweet potatoes, broccoli and tomatoes. "[When eating] tomatoes, heat them up a little bit and put a little oil in them. It makes it easier to absorb the lycopene," Dr. Oz says. "Lycopene is another antioxidant, but it has additional benefits as well, which are particularly valuable for the heart."
While he's mentioned many of these antioxidant-rich foods before, Dr. Oz is ready to introduce a new entry to his hall of fame—the acai (pronounced "AH-sigh-EE"), a small fruit from South American rainforests that is often found in the United States in juice. "It has twice the antioxidant content as a blueberry, so it's a wonderful alternative," Dr. Oz says. "Look at the food label and make sure they don't have too many carbohydrates in there. It's available in all major stores now. It's just sort of breaking through."
Dr. Oz says you should eat about five servings of antioxidant-rich foods a day.
While Americans' number one source of antioxidants is from coffee, Dr. Oz says there are better hot beverages out there, like green tea.
Another great tea option is white tea. "It's not new—it's very old—and [has] been used for centuries for healing purposes."
White tea is from the same plant as green tea, but it's produced in a different way. While green tea is made of leaves dried to the point where the tea will be dark in color, white tea is made from an immature plant bud that isn't dried at all. Instead of steeping the leaves, white tea is steamed. Dr. Oz says the potential for medicinal benefits of white tea—beyond a very small amount of caffeine as compared with other kinds of tea and coffee—comes from this lack of drying.
Dr. Oz says you should drink about four cups of green or white tea a day.
One of the most talked about pieces of dietary news to arise in recent years is that red wine is good for your health. Dr. Oz says part of the reason is the alcohol and part is resveratrol, a powerful antioxidant that comes from the skins of grapes. Vintners add the grape skins back to make red wine, but they don't do the same process for white wine—so white wine has no resveratrol benefit.
"Resveratrol does one other thing," Dr. Oz says. "It turns on a system in your body that prevents your cells from aging. Now think about it. Where do they grow these grapes? On trees on hillsides, right? It's not a very hospitable environment. So those grapes are sending a signal to us that life might not be so good, so why not turn on that cellular chemistry that you have that allows you to live longer and better? That's why we think this has a benefit."
If you don't want the alcohol, Dr. Oz says you can get some resveratrol from Concord grape juice or other dark grape juices, but you won't get as much benefit as you would from red wine. "Eighty percent of the benefit of the wine is actually the alcohol, and 20 percent is the resveratrol," Dr. Oz says. "So it's the combination that makes red wine so valuable."
Of course, moderation is the key when drinking to your health. Dr. Oz says most people should drink about one glass of red wine a day, though some men can drink slightly more because males metabolize alcohol more effectively than females.
Did you know your spice rack is full of anti-aging secrets? Dr. Oz says research shows that cinnamon can decrease blood sugar levels and lower cholesterol, especially in people with type-2 diabetes.
Arthritis sufferers may also find relief in tumeric, a spice found in curry that has also been reported to help prevent Alzheimer's disease, he says.
Paprika and cayenne pepper can help fight high blood pressure and improve circulation, he says.
In lab studies, Dr. Oz says, eating rosemary has been shown to improve learning rates in rats—data that has been reproduced in humans.
Even ginger can decrease blood pressure, alleviate arthritis pain and reduce your risk of cancer. One way to get your daily ginger is from Dr. Oz's "green drink." Get the recipe.
Though fresh spices usually are best, Dr. Oz says they can still fight aging if they're dried.
As Dr. Oz has said before, one key to staying young is to keep your intestines healthy and bowels regular. This takes plenty of fiber—about 25 grams a day. That's about two and a half times more than the average American eats a day. Fiber works by keeping all the nutrients you eat in your intestines and releases them as needed. So how can you increase your intake? Eat more fruits, vegetables and foods rich in whole grains.
Dr. Oz and Oprah both love steel-cut oatmeal, which takes a bit longer—10 to 20 minutes—to make than regular oatmeal. "The longer it takes the oatmeal, the more the fiber is going to benefit you," Dr. Oz says. "So be patient with it. It doesn't take that long."
Some other good fiber-rich options include beans, brown rice and whole grain pasta. When you're in the bread aisle at the grocery store, here's one thing to keep in mind to maximize your family's health. "Remember, you don't want it to say 'mixed grain,' 'great grain,' 'the best for you grain.' It's got to say '100 percent whole grain.' If it doesn't say 100 percent, it's not."
If you are trying to increase the fiber in your diet, you might want to consider steadily building up your intake rather than quickly ramping it up—otherwise, you could find yourself running for the bathroom.
"You can't go from the average in America of 10 to 12 grams of fiber to the 25 grams that a woman needs or the 35 that a male needs just like that. It's just too much all at once," Dr. Oz says. "Remember there are more bacteria in your intestines than there are cells in your body, so there are a lot of guys in there, and they're just trying to metabolize the food. So you give them a lot of fiber all at once, they're going to make a lot of gas out of it."
One intestinally gentle way to increase your fiber is by adding psyllium husks to your food. "If you're having a lot of foods like beans, you can add just a little bit of something called Beano. There are other products like it, but they provide enzymes—natural enzymes—that help your body get rid of some of the gaseous elements."
Another way to offset the gaseous side effects of a dramatic increase in fiber, Dr. Oz says, is by eating a Peruvian whole grain seed called chia—which is the same grain used to make Chia Pets—though you obviously shouldn't eat a Chia Pet.
Chia is as chockfull of fiber as other whole grains, but it packs in even more vitamins. "Remember that broccoli I had before? [One of these muffins] has more magnesium than about 10 of those heads of broccoli, and it's got as much calcium in it as a couple cups of milk," Dr. Oz says. "It adds one other thing, too, by the way. It's very rich in the next big category, which are omega-3 fatty acids."
Another way to stay young that has gotten plenty of media attention lately is omega-3 fatty acids. If you're relying on flax seed for your omega-3s, Dr. Oz says you most likely need to roast or grind the seeds to release the oils. If you just eat them, you'd need to really chew them with your teeth, which is difficult to do. Other good sources include walnuts and hemp seeds.
One of the most widely reported sources of omega-3s is salmon. But recently many concerns have been raised about eating salmon—whether the fish is wild or farm-raised, worries about global sustainability, overfishing and rising mercury levels. The best way to get around these issues, Dr. Oz says, is to get to the source and eat what the salmon eat—spirolina algae, which has valuable DHA omega-3s. "We can avoid the issues of sustainability because we can get a ton of it," he says. "You can grow algae pretty easily, and it's a much more efficient way of getting it."
