umaru

Michael,

Thanks for all the great information and recommendations! It's time for me to study up!

Thank you all for the lively discussion! I'm fairly new to healthy eating and CR, so I know little except fairly mainstream information. I can understand that Dr. Greger is pro-vegan, but for laypeople like myself, his overall contribution has been positive to my health and my family's health.

Michael, thank you for pointing me to the CR and HR/HRV study. That's quite fascinating that CR also affects HRV. There was a period of time where I regularly measured my HRV while mediating in an effort to increase willpower, so another reason to do CR!

I'm encouraged to see that a couple of you have low HR in the 50s. I'd like to get down to that rate. What's the best way to measure this resting HR? I simply use a blood pressure monitor to get both my HR and pressure readings, but it's simply a single point in time and not while I'm asleep, which seems like the best time to measure resting HR.

Secondly, a question on CR practice. How do you determine what caloric requirement your body needs and then scale down for CR? How much are you scaling? 30%? 50%? Or is there another method? How do you ensure that you do not experience malnutrition? (Perhaps I should post a separate thread for this question?)

Thanks!

I follow Dr. Greger's NutritionFacts.org and today he released a video on higher heart rate risk factors for morbidity. I'm curious to know if any one here practices any lifestyle changes to lower heart rate (exercise/meditation/etc) to improve one's chances of living longer. If so, how low is your resting heart rate?

I try to practice daily meditation and I know it helps me lower my heart rate and blood pressure, but I'm still quite average in terms of heart rate, probably around 70bpm. I wonder if lowering my resting heart rate to 50bpm or lower would be a good idea or not. I'd prefer not to do excessive endurance exercise (for time and physical stress reasons) to lower it.

I'd love to hear what other people think of the topic!

Perhaps it won't be too long until we start to gain some real insights into the impact of the gut microbiome of health and longevity:

 

Obama administration to launch microbiome initiative, heeding scientists’ calls

 

The new National Microbiome Initiative will start with a federal investment of $121 million in funding from several agencies and will include private support from more than 100 outside organizations, including $100 million over four years from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, according to a White House fact sheet that was posted online on Thursday.

 

--Dean

Wow, that's awesome! I'm often surprised when our government actually does things that matter...