We all know someone who is bright and funny, lively and largely cheery, someone who lives every day to its fullest — and who is well into his or her senior years. These are the people who, when we leave their company, we think: I want to be like them when I get old.Yes, some of healthy aging has to do with genetic luck. But much of it has to do with making smart lifestyle choices every day of our lives, from eating well to laughing with friends to learning to tango.The Star spoke to an expert on aging and three sprightly seniors — who are experts in their own right — on what we can all do now to live it up like our trio later. ‘Healthy lifestyle factors are only healthy if we sustain them’Nicole Anderson, a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Health Sciences, talked to the Star about the kinds of New Year’s resolutions we can make today to help us be healthy and happy in our old age. For many of us in middle age, we know aging well is important. At the same time, old age seems really far away. Do we need to shift our thinking and start worrying about healthy aging now? Yes, we have to. Because we know that factors from our entire lifespan affect our cognitive health in our later years. These even go back to in utero factors, such as our mother’s health and lifestyle, and early childhood factors, such as the quality of our education or whether we lived in poverty or experienced trauma. We can’t do anything about that now, but we can start thinking about mid-life factors (that influence healthy aging.) The key ones being cardiovascular risk factors that affect not only the heart but also our brains, so things like obesity, hypertension and diabetes. We also need to think about the complexity of our jobs: the more we are challenged socially and cognitively in our jobs, the better our cognitive functioning later in life. And then there are late-life factors, such as how much we exercise and th ...
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