Helping your family members achieve their youngest RealAges says you want them around for a long time. Here are some tips and tricks you can use to help your family enjoy RealAge cooking—fabulous-tasting food that is also healthy and easy to make. Even getting your teenagers into the act isn’t that tough.
Our social supports definitely reduce the aging effects of stress, and one of the best social supports is family. Happily married couples live longer than single people and with a higher quality of life. Although few data exist for unmarried people in long-term, mutually monogamous relationships, the same is probably true. Thus, people who live together should care about one another, and about the food the partner consumes. If your spouse is as interested as you are in making your RealAge younger, and enthusiastically participates in the RealAge lifestyle, congratulations! He or she is showing love for you and will probably be around to share a vigorous and happy life.
People who say they’re happily married have as much as a 6.5-year younger RealAge than their unmarried counterparts. Widowhood and divorce can have an even greater impact on aging than being single. Studies in three countries found that successfully married men were less likely to have cardiovascular disease than unmarried men, even if their bad (LDL) cholesterol levels were much higher.
In making your RealAge younger, marriage seems to be more important to men than to women. A 35-year-old man who is happily married has a 6.3 year younger RealAge than his single counterpart. Women who are under age 50 show a RealAge benefit of only 2.4 years for being married and little effect for being divorced. Why? The disparity may relate to underlying social differences between the genders. We don’t know for sure, but we assume that contemporary American women are more likely than men to have strong social support outside marriage. As popular psychologists “Dr. Phil” and John Gray note, outside of marriage, women (from Venus) tend to befriend, while for men (from Mars), it’s fight or flight. This difference means that the social support of marriage is much more key for men than for women. Also, women are more likely than men to suffer from abuse within their marriage. About half of the divorced women under age 50 seem to have an older RealAge, and about half have a younger one. Those who get younger may do so because of the benefits of leaving unhappy relationships. However, marriage becomes increasingly important to women as they get older. After age 50, women show a three-year benefit in RealAge from being married and 3.5 years of aging from being divorced.
What does all of this mean to you? If you are happily married or involved in a stable, long-term relationship, it is making your RealAge younger. When you cook healthy food for your spouse, you are extending that benefit. Rationalizing bad food choices—“Well, he likes ice cream, so I’ll treat him to a quart”—is not the way to “treat” your spouse. Such food choices will age your partner, sap energy, and make impotence, heart disease, and memory loss more likely to occur. It’s a true act of caring to take the extra time and make the extra effort to improve your partner’s diet with great tasting RealAge-smart dishes.
Learning to shop and cook together in the RealAge kitchen way can strengthen your relationship and improve your health, so you’ll have the energy and young arteries to share a vibrant and vigorous retirement (and sex, too). With that younger and healthier RealAge, you’ll be able to enjoy your grandkids and reduce the likelihood that your kids will have to take care of you. So stocking a kitchen in a RealAge-smart way isn’t selfish; making sure your kitchen has a high IQ is really showing love for those you care about most.
Training Taste Buds
Perhaps your spouse isn’t as keen as you are about making healthy changes in diet.
Maybe, in fact, he or she is resisting the idea, mistakenly believing that healthy eating will mean nothing but alfalfa sprouts and unflavored boiled broccoli, and feelings of deprivation. Perhaps you have children. As we all know, some children instinctively balk when they suspect that something might be good for them.
If this is the case with your family, try a subtle strategy. Lectures on the value of a healthy lifestyle never work, and once battle lines have been drawn on an issue, it’s hard to get them erased. A much more successful approach is to start retraining the family’s palate or taste buds. To win over a resistant family, gradually shift to a healthier diet.
The value of this low-key approach was demonstrated by one of the most successful restauranteurs in America. Lettuce Entertain You is a Chicago-based food group that has thirty-eight very successful restaurants in Chicago. Some have become popular franchises, such as Corner Bakery and Maggiano’s. Although the restaurants range from inexpensive to quite expensive, all have wonderfully delicious food. I am privileged to give medical advice to some of the general partners, and I’ve made repeated suggestions that their menus contain dishes that make people’s RealAges younger. I even pushed to start a RealAge café restaurant that would feature great, tasty food that would also give diners more energy and make them younger. In approximately 1987, Lettuce Entertain You put heart symbols next to its menu items that were “heart healthy.” Sales of those items fell dramatically! They were the same items, but just identified as healthy. Then the hearts disappeared, and the sale of those healthy items rose. But now I’ve noticed that the hearts have reappeared and sales have increased—people are gradually making their own choices to eat RealAge-smart. The people running Lettuce Entertain You think that attitudes have changed—people want to be shown that tasty can be healthy, and it can be. A low-key gradual approach also seems to win over the taste buds as well as the hearts of family members. Plan to train your own and your family’s taste buds gradually. Reducing unhealthy fats is the first step to ease your family into a younger RealAge.
The Healthy Fat Substitutes
We weren’t born with a genetic predisposition to prefer unhealthy fats. We learned to like those things just by exposure to them. Likewise, we can retrain our taste buds to prefer healthy food choices that give more energy and a younger RealAge, such as healthy fats.
Yes, some fats are healthy, and a little fat in your diet is healthy. But the fat should be unsaturated (monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fat), as those fats make you younger. In contrast, saturated fat (“four-legged fat,” or animal fat) and trans fat are unhealthy. Saturated fat is found in red meats, full-fat dairy products, palm and coconut oils, and, to a lesser extent, poultry and other animal products. Saturated fats do more than make the bad cholesterol increase in your bloodstream, which ages your arteries and promotes heart disease, stroke, memory loss, impotence, and even wrinkling of the skin. Saturated fats and trans fats also impede your immune system, which increases your risk of cancer and serious infections.
In contrast, polyunsaturated fats, such as corn oil, soybean oil, and most vegetable oils, and the fats in fish, avocados, and nuts will make your RealAge younger. Monounsaturated fats are even better. These latter fats are specifically found in olives, olive oil, cold-pressed canola oil, and flax seed. Just substituting healthy fat for unhealthy fat makes your RealAge 3.5 to 6 years younger, depending on your age and gender. Decreasing the total amount of fat in your diet, switching from unhealthy to healthy fats, and making healthy substitutions (such as avocado for butter; skim or soy milk for whole milk) are all good ways of decreasing the amount of aging fat in your diet. And that switch can be made easily by retraining your palate.
Retraining the palate takes about eight weeks. Make small, gradual substitutions that slowly retrain your family’s taste buds. If you switch suddenly from whole milk to skim, or from Doritos to Baked Lays potato chips, the skim milk will probably taste watery and the Baked Lays might taste like cardboard at first. If you switch gradually, food will always taste good, with no period of watery or cardboard taste. Once you’ve retrained your palate, whole milk will taste too fatty and the skim milk will be delicious; the Doritos will taste too oily, while the Baked Lays will be crisp, crunchy, and less aging. (Retraining the palate is worth 10 Kitchen IQ points.)
But don’t abandon fat! Eating a little fat before a meal is beneficial. First, a small amount of fat slows digestion—more specifically, will slow emptying of stomach contents into the small intestines. Because your stomach stays full for longer, you feel full, your appetite decreases, and you eat less. Second, a little fat helps keep blood-sugar levels stable. Because sugars are largely absorbed in the intestine, the fat-induced delay in the movement of food into the intestine means that sugars are absorbed more slowly. As a result, the level of sugar in the blood rises more slowly and doesn’t peak as high. Evening out the peaks in the levels of sugar in the blood retards some of the aging that arteries experience when blood sugar levels are high.
The third reason to eat a little fat first is that healthful fats help in the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins such as A, D, E, and K, and fat-soluble nutrients such as lycopene and lutein. And fourth, healthy fats help improve your blood cholesterol levels. Although the exact mechanism is not known, monounsaturated fats reduce the amount of bad or lousy (LDL) cholesterol in the blood. At the same time, people who include healthy fats in their diets are more likely to see an increase in their healthy (HDL) cholesterol levels.
The Benefits of Other Food Substitutions
A host of RealAge foods—such as granola made with olive or canola oil, wheat germ, nonfat yogurt, or bone-strengthening skim or soy milk—can often be added to or substituted for less healthy foods without changing the taste very much at all. (Send a list of your favorite substitutions to us at DrsMikeandJohn@RealAge.com.) For example, a patient told me he grinds granola or wheat germ very fine in a blender or food processor and adds it to cake mixes or bread dough to make the texture more enjoyable. (It’s often the texture, and not the taste, of a specific food that people crave.) Nonfat yogurt can be stirred into sour cream or a sour cream–based dip to reduce the aging fat content while keeping the zing. Skim milk can be added to whole milk.
If you experiment, you’ll be surprised to see how many RealAge food substitutions you can make in your family’s normal diet without anyone even noticing. The key to success is to detect, by trial and error, how much you can substitute before your spouse or children object to the retraining efforts. For example, start by adding ½ cup of soy or skim milk to a quart of whole milk. Then slowly increase this amount until a comment is made about the taste of the milk. Once this happens, cut back the amount of soy or skim milk a little. At this point, you’ve established the best ratio of soy or skim milk to whole milk for your family. Eight weeks or so later, add more soy or skim milk to the mix.
Try to assess all of your meals in terms of how they could be made healthier (and tastier) through additions, subtractions, or substitutions. For example, if your children insist on hamburger, crumble in a veggie burger or mix in a little cooked brown rice. Remember, it’s the texture—or even just the idea—and not the taste of certain foods that people often object to or, conversely, enjoy. Your kids probably won’t even notice the difference and may even prefer the new version.
You may feel sneaky and have pangs of guilt when you put out a container of whole milk you know contains a significant amount of skim or soy milk. The guilt will fade when you see the results: the healthy glow that comes from eating food that tastes great and makes their RealAges younger. Chances are, your family (especially the adults) will feel better physically without knowing exactly why. Retraining their palates shows you love them and care about not only their enjoyment of food but also their health and vitality.
RealAge Food for Infants
Of course, you don’t have to feel the least bit guilty when it comes to feeding the healthiest foods to your infant. Substitutions keep your baby healthier, and you are creating a healthy palate from the start. One important RealAge kitchen tip is that cooking at home is often better than eating out or buying prepackaged food, in part because you have complete control over the ingredients. This health tip is certainly true for the food you give your infant—not to lower her or his RealAge, obviously, but to start it off with healthy eating habits.
For example, giving a baby commercial baby food that is high in sodium may be predisposing him or her to a lifetime of hypertension. Another ingredient you don’t need is any kind of starch that has been added as a filler. Babies have small stomachs and need great nutrition from their food. The filler in commercial food is replacing nutrient-rich food in your child’s stomach.
A great alternative to buying commercial baby food is to make it yourself. Although many tired parents might consider making baby food as just one more chore, they find that making baby food in bulk and freezing it properly for future use actually takes less time, overall, than making several trips to the market to pick up commercial baby food. All you’ll need is your blender or food processor and small containers in which to freeze individual portions. These containers could be very small Tupperware types, or if you’ve bought commercial baby food in the past, you can wash the jars thoroughly and reuse them. You can also freeze the baby food in an ice cube tray and then store the cubes in a larger container.
For vegetables, cook the vegetables as you normally would, then thin the mixture in the blender or food processor with either the water in which you boiled the vegetables, as it will contain some vitamins, or low-sodium vegetable juice or broth (homemade would really be great). Very lean meats can be lightly sautéed (above 165 degrees for 15 seconds) and blended with broth. Celery or other vegetables may be added for flavor and flavonoids. Very young infants need liquefied food. As the baby grows, you can reduce the blending time so that the food is a little chunkier; chunkier food will promote chewing. Check with your pediatrician.
You can be just as creative with your baby’s food as you are with the rest of the family’s food. Cook and blend fruits with liquid, then stir in yogurt for a calcium punch. Remember, it is smart to train the palate to prefer certain foods at a very early age.
On many occasions, you won’t even have to make baby food specially or thaw what you have in the freezer. The food you prepare for the rest of the family will often be perfectly fine for baby if the food is run through the blender or food processor with a little liquid. Taste it first, of course. Giving a baby a taste of the grown-ups’ healthy food can be a great first step in developing a younger, more vigorous lifetime.
RealAge Foods for Children
The sooner you start your children on the path to healthy eating, the better. Many parents serve their children “kiddie” food and then expect them, at about age 12, suddenly to enjoy grown-up food. Of course, the change hardly ever happens that way. Be creative about introducing kids to different foods at an early age so they can develop a well-rounded palate. They’ll then discover that hot dogs and fried-chicken nuggets are not as tasty or as good for them as a grilled still-juicy chicken breast with salsa or a RealAge burrito (at www.RealAge.com).
Small children love to help, and that is the key to instilling a preference for RealAge-smart foods and a high-IQ kitchen. Once a week, encourage your children to help you prepare a dish or meal. When they play a part in the meal and feel needed, they get hooked on cooking and feel comfortable in the kitchen. Even if they simply make a mess and cause more work for you, your extra effort will be rewarded in later years, when they are able to lend a hand in food preparation, and perhaps even cook healthfully for you. And, yes, it will take extra time, but it is truly quality time.
You might try introducing children to new foods by relating the foods to what is happening in current events. If your kids love soccer and the World Cup is being held in Italy, make Tuscan Tuna. If their favorite pop band is touring the South, make Cajun Couscous-Crusted Monkfish. If the president is visiting China, make Rainbow Shrimp Moo Shu Roll-Ups. You’ll be able to discuss geography and current events while making it fun to experience a wide range of foods.
Kids of all ages love games and challenges, and it’s easy to increase your kitchen’s IQ and make eating RealAge-smart fun. See who can use celery sticks and peanut butter to pick up the most raisins as a snack. Or, when you go shopping, play the game my daughter Jennifer and I used to play: see who can find the healthiest peanut butter (least trans and saturated fat—remember to check the label). The person who finds the peanut butter made only with peanuts, like Smucker’s, wins. (When I started looking for peanut butter with my daughter, I was surprised to find that some chunky peanut butters are made with just peanuts; thus, the fat present is peanut oil, a healthy oil. Other chunky peanut butters contain trans fat (the peanuts are mixed with partially hydrogenated vegetable oil), and this makes you older. If you eat a lot (a lot!) of peanut butter, the difference in just having the wrong kind of chunky peanut butter can translate to being as much as 3.5 years older.)
Other choices of packaged and canned or jarred foods can be used in this game. For example, see who can find the healthiest mayonnaise (made with canola or olive oil), or where the whole wheat pitas are in the store. Just hunt for one or two new “best” items during a shopping trip, and you’ll soon accumulate a roster of great-tasting choices that are the healthiest in that store. (Reading labels and choosing the best products is worth a whopping 10 Kitchen IQ points, as your kitchen will be stocked with healthy items. You and your children will have fun together, too.)
RealAge Foods for Teenagers
It’s ironic (and sad, from a physician’s point of view) that when human beings go through their most accelerated period of growth—the teenage years—they often have the least nutritious diet. Teenage bodies desperately need healthy calories, calcium, and vitamins, but all too often teens subsist on soda pop, vending-machine corn chips, burgers, and fries. Each of these foods saps energy—energy needed in the teen years more than ever—and ages the arteries, leading later in life to impotence, decay in the quality of orgasm, and wrinkling of the skin, in addition to heart disease, stroke, and memory loss. The unhealthy food choices of young Americans also age the immune system (leading to many types of autoimmune disease, including many forms of arthritis and cancer). That change in diet to unhealthy foods for American girls is thought to be one reason breast cancer is occurring in woman substantially earlier than it did four decades ago.
Teenagers are keenly aware of their bodies. Partly because of the unrealistic body images projected by the media, teenagers (especially females) often strive for impossibly thin bodies. Endless dieting can keep them nutritionally deprived, especially if what they do eat are nutrient-poor, calorie-rich foods such as onion rings and cheesecake or carrot cake. Such choices can deprive teenagers of key nutrients required for body and brain development at a time when they need those nutrients most.
To help a teenager, eat with them, and teach him or her how to order healthy foods at fast-food and pizza places—a salad shaker, grilled chicken with a red or green salsa (and no mayo), cheeseless vegetarian pizza with extra vegetables, a vegetarian sub without cheese or oil but with double vegetables, plus olives and avocado. Hold the bagged cheese and commercial sour cream and substitute avocados on that taco salad. Even at typical fast-food chain eateries, it doesn’t take much effort to make substitutions that taste great and give more energy. Doing so is worth 0 to 24 Kitchen IQ points, depending on how often your family uses such eateries.
You can’t control everything your teenagers do when out of sight, and this certainly applies to what they eat. However, you can make sure that the meals they have at home, both breakfast and dinner, pack the biggest nutritional punch possible. Make sure your children know that they can have great-tasting food that also gives energy, such as healthy peanut butter, fruit, nuts, and cocoa-based chocolate. Talk with your children about the importance of making time for breakfast—it’s a key to staying slim and energetic. (Eating breakfast every day is worth up to 21 Kitchen IQ points.) If you really can’t pry your kids out of bed until the last minute, teach them how to make a fruit smoothie they can bolt down before leaving, and tuck an apple (cut up and sprinkled with lemon juice) or a banana into the backpack they take to school. Make dinner a sit-down fun event to which every member of the family is expected—and will want—to attend.
Being a teenager is hard enough without feeling weak, dizzy, or fatigued from eating food that saps energy. Although teenagers may appear not to hear a word you’re saying, they really do look to parents for advice. If you are a great role model by providing delicious, nutrient-rich food, you are giving your teenagers their best chance of enjoying those all-important years as they pass into adulthood. Remember what Dr. Phil says, “Talk with them, don’t preach to them.” Even if they do not change their diets now, they will have heard you and maybe will change later. I know Jennifer, our daughter, never “heard” me during high school, but since she’s in college, she seems to have used those talks to influence her choices for the better.
Mealtime as a (Family) Stress-Reducer
Stress causes aging in all three systems that we know age us (arterial aging, immune aging, and aging from environmental factors and accidents). Stress makes it more likely for heart disease, stroke and memory loss; stress increases the likelihood you’ll have an older immune system and be prone to cancer, infections, and arthritis; and stress increases your risk of accidents. Having three or four major stressful events in one year can make your RealAge more than thirty years older. Cultivating lots of friends, developing strong social support networks, and learning strategies for coping with stress can minimize these effects.
One good way to minimize the effects of stress is to use mealtimes to reduce stress. Connect with friends and laugh—laughter is a whole-body stress reducer that makes your immune system younger. Laughter opens lines of communication with others and reduces anxiety, tension, and stress. Having a network of close friends or family can help prevent aging from excessive stress.
Making the place where you eat special is another way to reduce stress and avoid eating absentmindedly. Always sit down when you’re eating, and decorate the special place with colors and furniture that are particularly pleasing to you and your family. Making mealtime a fun-loving family event can greatly reduce the aging of your arteries and immune system, and help you avoid the aging that comes as a result of accidents.