WHAT LIFE AHEAD IS and DOES
Abstract: Life Ahead - a new and powerful computer program provided as a free download by its author - shows how many people probably can gain 15 or more years of healthy life from acceptable changes in diet, exercise and other lifestyle factors. The program values the benefits from user's health habits and factors including the amounts of 23 key nutrients in each entered diet, and compares these with values needed for best long range health. It shows the specific things that can be done to achieve best long range health, and how much benefit the change in each action can produce. Life ahead can provide an objective health value for any diet or amount and kind of any exercise. The program can value for a first time the short term and long term health benefit of adding any amount of an included food to any base diet.
Life Ahead opens up an entirely new window about how exercise, diet, and even how individual foods and the diet supplements we take can determine importantly our health and life. This depth of information has not been obtainable from today's conventional health research studies and statistics. Life Ahead is based on new, objective and state-of-art analyses of the useful major health research found. These analyses plus the actual results of thousands of individual studies are explained and verified by more than sixty articles on this website: http://www.lifeahead.net. The Life Ahead computer program uses technologies of bio-chemical engineering that appear not been previously used in the analysis of health and life.
The Life Ahead Program: The major diseases that terminate the lives of 75% of people in the US today are atherosclerosis and cardiovascular diseases, and cancer. Tens of thousands of research studies are published each year on risks of these major diseases. But we face two problems in trying to use this information. First, we are overwhelmed by the many things we are supposed to do. Second, it is near impossible to know which of this advice is of major importance, which is trivia, and which is really the dubious dogma that long has plagued the search for health.
Life Ahead computes how risk of major diseases can develop or regress at each age of life as a result of various influencing factors. A user first enters information about exercise, diet, and other habits. Also a variety of health measurements are asked that can be helpful if available. The program then develops the WELL-DAYS, or the number of future days alive and free of major disease a population of people having these identified habits and health factors probably will enjoy.
Life Ahead next selects the usually acceptable changes in habits that can slow down the progress of these killer diseases. Key new capabilities of Life Ahead include its more accurate than previous analysis of the importance of up to 23 different nutrients in diets. And its new and important analysis of the benefits of vitamin and other diet supplements. And its more accurate than past analyses of the cardiofitness and health benefits of each kind and amount of exercise. The program then re-computes and displays the reductions in risk of each disease and the likely added Well-Days of life that will result from each habit change. A user can then view the specific actions needed to obtain the improvement in Well-Days possible that often will total to 15 or more years of potential healthful life for a person of middle age. Life Ahead then usually can suggest how risk of heart disease can be reduced by more than ten times. Or how risk of cancer can be reduced four times. The analysis can warn some users of a 95% likelihood of a heart attack as soon as within the next ten years, and show how this usually can be avoided.
But although we probably can forecast the Well-Days average for a population of individuals for any combination of health factors, some individuals will do better and some will do worse than that of the average population. It is impossible to forecast the exact health problems that each individual may face. Even so, it still remains likely that a computed gain or loss in Well-Days for a change in habits still will provide a useful index of the potential change in future health for most people. And this can guide us to take those actions that will produce best long range benefit.
Life Ahead Uses Global Analysis: We are barraged today with advice from health studies. Each tells us we should be doing this, or argues that what was advised before is no longer true. Rarely mentioned is that nearly all of these health studies have very wide margins of error, or that a third to a fourth of studies on most subjects often produce results that disagree with the majority. . Despite much time, cost and researcher expertise, it is very difficult to obtain truly valid information from individual research studies of groups of people. So-called experts are continually arguing about nearly every health factor as for example about the health value of vitamins and other supplements because of just one or two recent study results.
The global analysis of health research used in Life Ahead helps the health-interest person to learn what is most probably correct.. First it produces an objective analysis of ALL or nearly all of the available useful research data found to date on a given factor in all studies found. With results usually from a dozen or 50 or more studies this usually removes the problem of individual study error. Second, Global Analysis analyzes major diseases not just as statistics but as biochemical processes that proceed slowly but destructively throughout life. This analysis aims to identify how much our specific health actions can speed up or slow down these unwanted biochemical processes. A Global Analysis quantifies with use of engineering methods how much a given health action can reduce or increase the risk of major diseases at every age, and how much such an action can change the length of our healthy life. This provides a more comprehensive and accurate method than that possible using just the statistical factors or ratios obtained from individual studies. .
Life Ahead opens up a new window of knowledge. We can enter a usual diet in a few minutes. We then can display the amounts of twenty three life determining nutrients of fats, vitamins, and minerals and see immediately how the health of the diet can be improved. The health value of diets or a food in a diet from all of these included diet nutrients can be far different that that assumed only from usual ideas about fats and cholesterol. Life Ahead provides the first available technology for valuing the long range health benefit of adding or subtracting any food from our diet. For example, you can easily find the effect of eating another egg or steak each day on risks of major disease and Well-Days of life. The results often can be very surprising.
The simple diet entry program will immediately show how diet calories, fats and carbohydrates total as each food is entered. It will show how probable weight loss or gain will change as each food is entered with a new method that automatically recognizes the added effect of diet carbo on weight change each week. Users can monitor and view all nutrient factors in a diet, and learn how various foods in a diet can contribute to calories, weight change and probable Well-Days of life
There has been much talk about antioxidants that are supposed to reduce the risks of heart disease and cancer. Yet there has been no way for knowing how much antioxidant is needed from foods and supplements in a diet to produce a maximum desirable protection against these major diseases. Life Ahead for a first time sums up our diet antioxidants, and often shows that we cannot get enough of them without using carefully planned amounts of diet supplements. Life Ahead shows amounts of important newly established factors such as omega-3 fats and lycopene in our diets and can point the way to relatively simple life-preserving measures that can maintain proper values of these nutrients that today are poorly recognized. Life Ahead also shows for a first time how the glycemic load of our diet - the factor that produces blood sugar and insulin resistance - can affect our risks of major disease and Well-Days of life.
We are continually admonished to "Exercise more." But today's usual recommendations on exercise have not only been inadequate but can waste enormous amounts of time for little real health benefit. The program shows how to gain the key benefit of cardiofitness that provides the real protection from disease from most efficiently planned exercise and time spent.
About Health Models and some History: A first version of the Life Ahead Model that analyzed exercise and cardiovascular diseases globally was developed from a seven-year project during 1975 to 1982. This model was described in Proceedings of the 19th Annual Meeting of the Society for Prospective Medicine, pp 52-61, and was a basis for a book - The Pulse Point Plan, Random House, NY (1982) by this author, Forrest H. Blanding. The book was reviewed and introduced by the top world authority on exercise and disease Dr. Samuel M. Fox. Thus this book and its appendix detail provides a scientifically based and reviewed reference. The findings in that book on cardiofitness, exercise and cholesterol that then were highly controversial have been confirmed repeatedly and near precisely by research published since that is shown on this website. Life Ahead Model #2 - a twelve year project placed on the internet about 2002 provided a vast advance over that first Life Ahead. (A few copies of this earlier now out-of-print but still relevant book can be made available)
The most recent Life Ahead Model #3 placed on the internet in August, 2006 provides a substantial advance over Model #2. Model #3 increases the number of disease-death causes in the model from 11 to 19. Now included are such important limiters of healthful life as diabetes, respiratory diseases or COPD, dementia or alzheimers, macular degeneration, flu and pneumonia, osteoporosis, arthritis and nephritis. The range of diseases has been extended so that Life Ahead #3 can compute at least approximate outlooks for persons well above age 100. The exercise and cardiofitness module has been substantially updated and improved.
But the major single improvement in Life Ahead model #3 is the extended section on diet analysis. As noted above, useful measures are now provided for factors such as antioxidants, omega-3 fats, glycemic load, and folic acid. These factors have been much talked about in the health press. But no useful way has been provided for health-interested persons to learn how much of these factors are present in their diets, and how these amounts compare with healthful target values. Life Ahead #3 provides the solution to this difficult problem. User can easily learn which nutrient deficiencies exist in their diets, and how much each of these deficiencies can cost them in Well-Days of life ahead. And the program shows that these new factors usually are much more important to health and life than are the more discussed factors of cholesterol, salt, and total fat.
A most interesting contribution of Life Ahead Model #3 is the new method for computing objectively the health value of any diet. Researchers have argued endlessly about health of low fat and low carbohydrate diets because of lack of any previous solution.
The new contribution of the Engineering based and Life Cycle method of Life Ahead is the extensive QUANTIFICATION of the benefits of life style habits. For example, conventional health advice variously suggests "Everyone should walk a mile, or 30 minutes, or 60 minutes each day." Life Ahead identifies how different kinds and amounts and intensity levels of walking and other exercise can produce a trivial 10% or a ten times reduction in heart disease; how different diets can lose or gain 5 years of Well-Days or accomplish little; or when and how specific diet supplements can produce a major benefit or no benefit. This new quantification shows that multiple life habits and factors combined with diet can have a far larger effect on our Well-Day s of life than previously has been realized. Because of the many new findings of Life Ahead, it was felt important to describe in detail how the program was constructed and to document the extensive research used in its development. Many of the actual formulas now used in Life Ahead are provided in the accompanying Health Research Library.
The Life Ahead Health Research Library on this website provides tables of the actual data from hundreds of key research studies that often include all useful research found published on a factor. This should improve confidence in the model results, and provide assurance that the program was based on a serious and objective analysis of the available research. Second, this will permit not only researchers and doctors but any individual with a scientific or engineering background to examine conveniently the results of major research on each risk factor. Much of this research has not previously been brought together in a consistent format and adequately analyzed. (See "Understanding Health Research"). The sum total of now available actual research that mostly seems to have been overlooked can provide devastatingly strong evidence about the importance of factors such as vitamins, diet and diet supplements and cardio effective exercise. It is hoped that this documentation will stimulate researchers and others to identify any bugs and more basic problems found with the present model, and contribute more research studies, data and constructive ideas that could lead to its improvement.
Looking Toward the Future: Life Ahead is believed to provide a first serious attempt to use bio-chemical engineering technology to the analysis of population health research. Although this should provide a major advance over past use of statistical equation methods, the present model still provides only an approximate quantification of how major diseases develop as result of potentially predictable chemical processes. Some included factors as for example the effect on disease of body weight are still quantified only at the statistical level. Ultimately, teams of biochemists, physical scientists and biochemical engineers should replace the present and approximate macro-quantitative BioChemical processes used in this Life Ahead with more detailed biochemical process kinetics. More knowledge about DNA should improve the family history factors that today involve a major potential error component in forecasting the health risk of individuals. Life Ahead also should be expanded to include more of the key life-destroying diseases and other diseases that diminish quality of life. It is hoped that others will initiate the development of more and better Global Analyses that move knowledge further beyond the dull statistics of so much of todays health research. Ideas received will be acknowledged and given careful consideration and worthwhile improvements will incorporated into the model.
About Publication and 'Peer' Review: Most health research is in form of individual research studies that produce specific data. Articles rarely take more than a dozen journal pages of space, and normally are for a single defined subject and are 'peer reviewed' before publication by two or more persons knowledgeable in the same field. Life Ahead includes not only an extensive computer program but more than 60 different articles on widely different subjects outlining its method, scope, and verification. Extensive interlinks among the various articles and evidence are provided. No known existing health or other journal provides a logical format for publication of this type of a project. Only the Internet now appears to provide for an appropriate publication platform. And the concept of Global Engineering Analysis appears largely new to the health field. It is hoped that reviewers will understand this publication problem and view the result as a scientifically based project that has important implications to our public health - and provide that 'peer' review that will be helpful to its eventual best acceptance.
The Doctor Should be Involved: Most actions advised in Life Ahead are via diet and exercise or other factors that must be managed by individuals themselves. But this or any other program of health maintenance should be done with periodic review and help from the doctor. Many health problems as for example diabetes can involve need for specialized diets that are not now considered a role of Life Ahead. Diets best for the health of most can have negative effects for a few. Many today need a doctor's exam and acceptance before starting even moderately intensive exercise. The doctor can help importantly if blood pressure or cholesterol is too high. Regular physical exams must be a part of responsible health management. Women have a particular need for regular female examinations. And the presence of various medical problems that are not a part of Life Ahead can alter an individuals proper approach to diet and exercise. Life Ahead shows that risks of disease can be drastically reduced by health actions. But no combination of health actions or lowest level of average risk can assure that an early major disease or death will not be suffered by some unfortunate persons.
Please browse some of the accompanying discussions. What Life Ahead Computes describes the program results in a bit more detail. More Well Days from Life Ahead tells how you can obtain specific added health benefits from things you can do. More Healthful Diets from Life Ahead tells you how to identify the health benefits of any specific food, combination of foods or diet. Losing Weight with Life Ahead suggests a new and quite different weight reduction program for trial.
Both scientists and non-scientists may find interesting: Atherosclerosis - a Biochemical Process and Cancer as a Biochemical Process. Researchers should consider reviewing Global Analysis: An Illustrative Example; and Some Concepts differ for Bio-Chemical Analysis. An extensive analysis of Exercise and Cardiofitness is provided in a separate section, and comprehensive analysis of research on exercise and two new scientific papers on cardiofitness are provided there. Those that question the large benefits computed by Life Ahead - and this will include many - should read 'Are Life Ahead Benefits Valid?
