Eggspensive!

 

 

Eggs have long been a cheap source of protein and come with a host of important vitamins and minerals including vitamin D, phosphorus, vitamin A, and two B-complex vitamins that your body needs to convert food into energy. Eggs are also a very good source of riboflavin, selenium, and choline. They still are nutritional heros but thanks to the millions of chickens that have died or been destroyed due to the bird flu outbreak, they are no longer cheap. The image above is from a grocery store in southern California, which has been particularly hard hit. There are even stories of egg entrepreneurs snatching up every egg they can find and reselling them to desperate consumers and even business at, shall we say, scalper prices.

 

But in addition to making regular appearances at breakfast table, eggs are also in an enormous variety of other foods, who's prices are now also rising as a result of the egg shortage. Baking, in particular, depends on them.

 

So for something entirely different, here are 25 egg-free desert recipes. I have tried a few of them and you will not miss the eggs. The strawberry shortcake that tops the list was a big hit at a recent church social that I brought them to. Try a few and brighten up your egg-free day.

 

And if you have any tips as to how to better manage in a world of $0.60 eggs, please do share in a comment.

To live Longer and Better, Stop Acting Your Age

 

"Act your age!" is usually said with a tone of disapproval, whether you are a toddler or well into your senior years. Society has clear expectations for us as far as what is proper behavior at any age, and not conforming is not always regarded kindly. Does it matter? New research suggests that perhaps it does.

Research by Hanna Kuper and Michael Mormot of the International Centre for Health and Society at University College in London, raises the question of just how much the way we think about aging impacts how we actually age. 

What Kuper and Marmot found was that those people who thought old age began earlier were more likely to have had a heart attack, to be suffering from heart disease or be in poor physical health generally when they were followed up six to nine years later. 

The Kuper and Marmot study is not the only research to demonstrate measurable benefits of thinking positively about ageing. Becca Levy from the Yale School of Public Health also produced some extraordinary findings. Her study had followed more than a thousand people who were at least 50 at the time. She found that people who had positive ideas about their own ageing (who agreed with comments such as "I have as much pep as last year" and who disagreed that as you get older you get less useful) lived for an average of 22.6 years after they first participated in the study, while the people who felt less positively about ageing lived for just 15 years more on average. 

How can this be? Read this article for answers.

 

How Long Have We Really Got?

 

Since we are here to talk about aging well - happy, healthy and long - I thought it would be interesting to look a little deeper into just how long a human being could possibly live. Is there a biological "design limit" on the human body? A time after which we just simply wear out and stop working?

Worldwide, less than 1% of the population lives to be 100 years old. The oldest documented lifetime is that of a French woman, Jeanne Calment, who lived to be 122 years and 164 days old. Most aging researchers agree that the maximum lifespan for a human being, the biological design limit, is about 120 years. But the truth is that no one really knows.

People today are living longer than ever on average. Most of this is due to societal advances such as vaccines, antibiotics, public health infrastructure, sanitation, hygiene, earlier diagnoses, and increased public awareness about health and longevity. But while people are living longer lives on average, the the age at which the very oldest people die does not appear to have changed much in all of recorded history.

“Everything has to have a limit. There’s no creature on planet Earth that we know of that doesn’t die at some point,” says Briana Mezuk, the co-director of the University of Michigan’s Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health. . “But there’s obviously substantial variation in life expectancy and healthy life expectancy, which is in some ways more important than the first question. How long can we live and be able to have the type of psychological, functional, and social life that makes life worth living? What is that life expectancy?”

And maybe that is the real point. Not how many years it is before we die but how many years we are living the active, healthy, mentally fit lives we want to live. Not the years in your life but the life in your years.

The problem of aging has been shifted down the road. People living into their 70s, 80s and 90s is more common every year. Alzheimer’s disease and other age-related chronic conditions have increased due to people living longer. “Now, many of us are living to our seventies; we’re experiencing this built-in obsolescence of humans that manifests itself in age-related chronic conditions,” said William Mair, the director of the Harvard Chan School Aging Initiative.

While contemplating how old we might theoretically live is interesting, perhaps a better approach would be to do what we can to ensure that whatever time we do have is a life and not simply an existence. And the best balms against aging poorly are the things our mothers and grandmothers told us to do: exercise regularly, avoid smoking, avoid drinking too much alcohol, and stay away from highly processed foods to focus on a balanced diet of healthy whole foods.