• Question: Are there ways to stop the preoblems of ageing?

    Asked by angeredwalrus to Alex, Amy, Andy, Georgia, Ollie on 22 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by duckfilledfapapus.
    • Photo: Georgia Campbell

      Georgia Campbell answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      There’s no way that we know of yet to prevent aging, but there are things you can do to reduce some of the health risks associated with getting older.

      Making sure you get lots of exercise is key – a lot of research has shown how bad leading an inactive lifestyle is for you, so the more active you are when you’re younger, the healthier and more capable of being active you’re likely to be when you get older!

      It’s also really important to eat healthily – I think one of the best pieces of advice is to make sure to ‘eat a rainbow’ every day – different coloured fruits and vegetables contain different things that are good for you, and you’ll get the best nutritional range from eating lots of different things 🙂

      There are also things that we know to avoid – smoking affects your health badly in lots of different ways, including lung disease, heart disease and cancer. Drinking too much alcohol is also bad for you – mainly your heart and liver – though a little bit of alcohol won’t hurt. Having a glass of red wine is supposed to actually be quite good for you – if contains lots of ‘antioxidants’, which help you age healthily! 🙂 Also, avoiding getting lots of knocks to the head is probably for the best – boxers and footballers (the one’s who do a lot of headers anyway), are more prone to parkinsons-like symptoms as they get older, as thebrain doesn’t handle being knocked around very well.

      This is all advice to help you age more healthily though, and some people will just be lucky enough to have good genes that help stop them having many health problems as they age. So there’s no way tostop aging, but we can at least try our best to make sure we’re as healthy as possible into old age!

    • Photo: Amy Reeve

      Amy Reeve answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      I think Georgia covered all the bases with her answer. I would just add that there is so much research going on at the moment trying to actually understand what causes ageing. There are loads of different theories that have been put forward by people and until we understand the cause there is no way we can ever think of preventing it or slowing it down. All though people are trying…..

      Like Georgia says the main thing to do is to look after your body and keep as healthy and active as you can 🙂

    • Photo: Andy MacLeod

      Andy MacLeod answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      There are ways to lessen some of the symptoms of old age, but we stil don’t know exactly what causes a lot of them.

      Georgia’s advice is good generally for keeping healthy, now and into old age, but there are still some factors of ageing that remain a mystery. Until we know exactly why these things happen, we won’t be able to cure them.

      But we’re still looking. 🙂

Comments