The
Life Ahead Model: What Is It? What Does It Do?
Developing a More Accurate Forecast of Life Ahead: Life Ahead
is a comprehensive engineering computer model of how our lifestyle habits determine
the health and life of our human body. A dedicated following of the health
advice we receive today might extend our longevity of that body by 6 to 7
years. This is important progress. But existing computer models of health
that are masses of dubious statistical equations may not help us do any
better. Life Ahead with its more advanced technology often can show a
usual
Typical Health Establishment advice today says. "Cut down on fat; Eat so many fruits and vegetables each day; eat so
many grams of fiber; Exercise 30 minutes every day." This can
be good advice. But it only goes part of the way toward obtaining best benefits
from our habits. Different fats can reduce or increase our health
risk. Different fruits and vegetables have vastly different amounts of the
biochemical nutrients that a specific body needs. 30 minutes per day of
exercise can do us little or much benefit. Advice on amounts of foods
to eat usually does not recognize that healthful amounts can vary nearly
three fold for small women and large men.
Our diets alone can determine 10 years difference in our likely healthy life.
Research now shows that the health of our diets is determined mostly by the
amounts of at least 23 now verified nutrient amounts we eat. These
include the many different fats, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and other
nutrients we consume. Virtually no one today knows the amounts of
these 23 key nutrients in foods that they now eat, or what amounts of them are
needed for best health. As a generality, fruits and vegetables are best
in vitamins and antioxidants. But when we study this further, a 1/2 melon
has 100 mg of Vitamin C, but a peach has only a far lower 6 mg Brussel
sprouts have 48 mg of Vitamin C but carrots have only 6 mg.
50-60% of the fat in a hamburger can be the harmful saturated type, but only
20% of that in fish and 10% of that in walnuts is harmful. You can be
seriously mislead if you assume that simply taking so many portions of fruit
and vegetables each day will supply the antioxidants that you need. Or
that just so many grams of Fat will protect you or any such other simplistic
rules as the diet pyramid will keep you at best health. People have had no
really useful way for knowing how much all important fiber or lycopene they now
eat, and have had virtually no knowledge of what inexpensive diet supplements
they need to take that might provide them another five years of healthy
life.
Yet the proper selection of just a few foods and some diet supplements usually
can correct most of the usual deficiencies in these diet nutrients at modest
cost. The occasional use of the Life Ahead Model may be today's only
practically useful way for showing people how to move conveniently and
acceptably toward an optimum diet regime for best future health. Life Ahead also guides you to an exercise program that can
provide you five more years of protection, as based on the author's book
"Cardiofitness Can Save Your Life" published in 2009.
What a Computation in Life Ahead Will Tell You: A Demo
Option in the program will permit you to display a Life Ahead result for men
and women of any age for 11 different sample diets without having to make
any usually required entry To learn your
own results from a program entry you must first enter some required and
some optional information on your life habits into the program. Once this
is done, an entry of your usual diet will develop from Life Ahead a vast amount
of health information on your likely future life. This includes:
1. Your healthy
life expectancy from present age and your risk of heart disease and cancer in a
next ten years
2. Your healthy
life expectancy and risks of these diseases if all health habits are changed
this year to Life Ahead best recommended health habits. The advantage for good vs. present habits.
A typical person
may gain 15 more years, and reduce risk of heart disease ten fold and risk of
cancer five fold. A person observing today's usual expert health advice
may get a much lesser 8 more years of healthy life and reduce major disease
risk by a lesser 3 more times..
3. The
"Get More Well-Days" display on the Main Results Display will show
what you need to do to get these benefits, and shows your potential benefit
from each action. Other options on the Main Results Display are:
4. The
"Diet Display" will show how 16 of your key diet nutrients compare with
optimum values for health and show the likely gain for revising each to
optimum. Further options here provides extensive
advice on how to bring each diet nutrient to best values with foods and/or
supplements.
5. The "Health
Value a Food" option can develop a sophisticated estimate of the effect on
potential future health and life of permanently adding or subtracting one or
more portions of any of 380 included individual foods to the potential
health value of your included diet. Life Ahead
provides what is believed to be a first method for scientifically accomplishing
this.
6. The
"Value Supplements" option can measure the contribution to healthy
days ahead for adding or subtracting any nominal amount of up to 13 different
nutrient diet supplements to any entered practical diet. These include
popular vitamins, minerals and other non-prescription nutrients, taken either
as singles or in multiples.
7. The
"Exercise/Fitness" option will help
you explore the amounts of different types of exercise needed to gain health
potential years from good cardio and other exercise.
8. The
"Weight" option will let you compute a likely change in your Life
Outlook for changing your body weight to a different number of pounds.
Note that reducing weight below ideal can be harmful to
health.
9. Life Ahead will for the "List All Diseases" display an
individuals risk of the 18 most important major diseases and death for each
life outlook during a next selected period. This can guide a person to take
extra steps to protect from his or her most likely future health problems.
10. Life Ahead displays your probable long range weight from every
practical diet entered as foods are added or subtracted from it. This can guide you to develop diets what
should help manage your long range weight. If desired, you can learn easily the
number of calories you eat every day. The program uniquely recognizes the somewhat
differing body weight obtained from carbohydrate and protein calories.
11. The
"Change Other Factors " option permits you
to explore the effect of changing a variety of other health actions valued by
Life Ahead.
12. For those with
a family disease history, the health actions best for protecting from specific
diseases are shown for "Heart Disease", types of "Cancer",
"Diabetes", "Alzheimer's" and "Macular
Degeneration."
A major weakness in past diet programs for health has been the difficulty of
diet entry.. Users usually must browse through
thousands of foods to find ones matching their actual foods. Entry of a meal
typically can take an impractical tiresome hour of time and the available food
values are mostly for commercial preparations,
not the foods usually used in homes. Life Ahead
solves this with averaged nutrient values for just 380 foods that provide 95+%
of what people actually eat. With a search function and a little practice
a day's diet can be entered into Life Ahead in a relatively few minutes. The
program can enter a weekly diet if wanted in easily practical time, and develop
nutrients from often used recipes that can simplify entry further.
What the Life Ahead Model Is: Life
Ahead starts with a real representation of the health life of an average man
and women in the
Tables are next prepared for the average major health risk factors of men and
women at ages 18 to 90. These factors include height, weight, blood
pressures, cholesterol, LDL, HDL, exercise, cardiofitness and cigarette
smoking. These values are based on published US Department of Health values for
our population. This provides us a real-world model of how major diseases
and major health risk factors progress at each year of age in the
A next need was the development of most accurate known risk factors
relationships for changes in rates of disease
and death that depend on our life style. Life Ahead now includes
134 of these factors that can contribute to how healthy and how long we will
live. These risk factors include the above nine major health risk factors, the
23 different diet nutrients we need to eat, the exercise we do, our family
history of different diseases, and the potential benefit of other health
actions that most of us should be observing. The Life Ahead has been
advancing now for more than 30 years via 3 major updates. Each factor in the
Model involved a review of all published
research found on the wellness effect of the factor on risk of different
diseases and death. Each risk factor in Life Ahead thus is felt to
provide a state-of-art best available relationship for long range health.
How Life Ahead Reflects what Really Happens to our Health: Research on the
benefits of our habits usually report that doing something such as exercise or
taking a vitamin "Reduced risk of a disease by some percent." The
inference is that doing this reduces this risk immediately. This rarely
happens. Most of our life style habits develop benefits gradually over times
that can range from near immediate to a near lifetime. Our largest
studies show that first occurrences of lung cancer from require about 25 years
of continued smoking. It can take up to 15 years after smoking is stopped for
the risk of smoking to disappear. Other cancer usually develops over similar
long periods of time. Life Ahead mirrors this
reality.
Heart diseases develop mostly from the atherosclerosis that clogs arteries.
Taking dietary supplements such as Vitamin E or other antioxidants reduces this
clogging by only about 3% for each year they are taken. It takes 10 to 20
years of taking this nutrient before a really substantial reduction in risk of
heart disease from many of these diet factors can be measured. Taking
aspirin that changes the clotting tendency of blood may develop benefit more
immediately, and exercise may develop much of its benefit after about a
year. But these benefits can disappear over different times after it is
stopped. Life Ahead computes its results year by
year for life and reflects properly how much benefit each new action
contributes to health during each further year of life
How Life Ahead Computes its Results:
The program develops three complete computations of lifetime year by year risk
of 19 disease, death and life expectancy groups for each age of
life. The first is a verification outlook that is done periodically to be
sure the program is producing correct results. This outlook computes the
program's key disease, death and expectancy values for the
The program then computes two complete new life profiles for the
individual: First is a present user outlook at past and present habits.
The program user's risk factors are used to construct a life profile for the
user that differs from the average
The second new life profile assumes that a complete change to better habits
would take place at present age. These better habit vales all are set by
what is felt to be state-of-art habit values for lowest risk of disease. The
effect of the new and lower risk factors would be factored into risks stepwise
for factors such as atherosclerosis and cancer for which results are
time-dependent. A comparison of the results for better habits and those
for present habits provides a direct measure of the potential reduction in risk
of major disease and likely increase in years of healthy life. Most of
the extensive above results 1 through 11 are
then derived from comparisons of these life profiles for present and good
habits.
How Does Life Ahead Forecast such Larger Benefits for
Good Habits than have been Cited in the Past? Our Health Establishment develops
conclusions at an incredibly slow pace. When I started a review of the
health value of exercise in the mid 1970's experts had been arguing strenuously
for 20 years that "Exercise is not proved. It is a minor health
factor at best ." I found an incredible 50
scientific studies had then been published. All but an
insignificant one or two showed exercise to be of major importance to health.
Researchers usually are in no hurry to reach conclusions. Nearly
every research paper starts with a justification as "We need his research
because past results are inconsistent" and ends with "We now
need more research" They must say this because the reviewers
of their papers are other researchers working in the same area and who want to
keep doing more research too. No one then seemed to have really reviewed
adequately the research we had on exercise, and many experts seemed
knowledgeable of only a few most recent studies.
The Life Ahead project has scoured the health literature for every verified health
risk found for each of 17 included major causes of death for most of two
decades. The word "Verified" was defined as health factor that was at
perhaps a 90% likely level and that would convince a usual health interested
person to take action. A least 3 good confirming studies without contrary
findings or potential harm and done on actual people were a required minimum
for a health factor inclusion in Life Ahead. A causal basis was sought
for each risk wherever possible, and some of the key risks are verified by more
research than has been involved in any other review published. For
example 331 research studies were reviewed in establishing the effect of
antioxidants and major diseases; 100 research study data sets were used in
defining the effect of exercise and fitness on heart disease and cancer; and 90
research studies were involved in valuing Vitamin E and its effect on heart
disease and cancer. (Despite recent invalid contrary information on this
vitamin, 93% of all 90 actual research study sets showed a likely benefit for
Vitamin E.) Results of about 60 of these studies of health risk factors are posted on the Life Ahead Web Site, www.lifeahead.net
Factors as fish oil and Vitamin D that are getting much discussion today were
included accurately in Life Ahead a decade ago. Life Ahead simply can be far
ahead of the usual health advice that reaches the press without continuing
controversy. . The program does not include health factors that derive from
just biochemistry or animals. There is no claim that any health factor
might not be found incorrect at some time in the future. Our knowledge
never reaches a 100% level. But a prudent person's best approach to
maintaining health will be to act on what is most likely at any point in time.
Advising this "most very likely" has been the objective of Life
Ahead.
Please Try Life Ahead Out. Download the program It is
entirely free. I ask only that you tell me about your reaction and any problems
you find. First run the "Demo" option at your age and select
"Typical US Diet". This represents typical US men and women who
do not smoke and use no dietary supplements. Then restart the program and
enter your own habits and factors into the several following Entry Screens when
asked. Ask your doctor's nurse for your cholesterol values and blood
pressure if needed. Average values will be assumed if you skip entries,
so the more actual entries you make, the more accurate will be the forecast of
results. You always can go back and add entries later.
Good Luck and
Best Wishes
Author:
Forrest H.
Blanding
forrestx@cox.net