Secrets to Men’s Health and Longevity

Don’t believe in ancestral secret recipes or sky-high-priced health products. If men want to live a healthy and long life, the core logic is very simple – avoid the two exclusive minefields of “hard-to-carry disease” and “smoking and alcohol addiction”, and do three small things in a down-to-earth manner: “not suppressing emotions, not taking supplements randomly, and moving appropriately”, and leave the rest to chance.

In the five years I have been doing health science popularization, I have come into contact with no less than two hundred male interviewees aged 40 to 60. What impressed me the most are two extremely contrasting examples: Uncle Zhang, 78 years old in the community, used to run long-distance freight for 20 years. He smoked and drank a lot when he was young. He had grade 3 hypertension and suffered from gastric ulcers. Now he rides a bicycle for half an hour every day to go fishing in the countryside and climbs a hill without being out of breath.； The 42-year-old Internet executive I met last year had been diagnosed with high uric acid and moderate fatty liver disease during his physical examination for three years. He always said that "this problem for a grown man is nothing to worry about." Last month, he had a gout attack and was in a wheelchair for a follow-up visit. He already showed signs of early kidney damage. Don’t believe it, there are really too many men who regard “making things” as their advantage, and end up turning small problems into big troubles.

Have you ever had a time like this: You have to deal with a headache or a fever, and then you take medicine when you can't bear it any longer. Your wife keeps urging you to go for a physical examination and says, "I'm in great health, why waste that money?" There is a very interesting clinical statistic. The frequency of men taking the initiative to seek medical treatment is 30% lower than that of women. Many people are hospitalized for myocardial infarction or cerebral infarction for the first time. They did not even have frequent colds before. In fact, they are just minor ailments that accumulate to a critical level and explode immediately. Of course, some people will say, "I just don't like going to the hospital, and I've been fine for so many years." This is true. After all, there are individual differences, but we ordinary people really don't need to bet on the probability of "I am the exception." Taking half a day every year for a routine physical examination is more effective than any emergency rescue.

Interestingly, I have asked many men over 30 around me, and they all know that smoking and drinking are harmful to the body, but they always use "work needs" and "not being able to socialize" as excuses. Someone once argued with me, "My grandfather smoked all his life and lived to be 92 years old." This is a typical survivor bias - you only saw an old smoker who lived to be 92 years old, but you didn't see that more than 70% of lung cancer patients in the respiratory ward have a history of smoking for more than 10 years. Of course, there is no need to practice absolute abstinence. It is okay to drink an occasional drink or two when gathering with friends or smoke a cigarette with the elders during festivals. However, if you treat "two drinks a day and a cigarette after a meal" as your daily routine, no matter how good your body is, you will not be able to bear it.

After talking about the pitfalls to avoid, let’s talk about the three little things that sound simple but are difficult to do. First of all, don’t hold back your emotions. This may sound like chicken soup, but it is really a point that psychiatrists and cardiologists repeatedly emphasize. We have been taught since childhood that "men don't shed tears lightly" and swallow them when we are wronged or stressed. In fact, emotions are like the gas in a pressure cooker. The valve is always blocked and will explode sooner or later. Uncle Zhang used to be famous for being a boring gourd. Not only did he get into trouble when selling goods, but also got into conflicts with others. A few years ago, his wife left and he was bored at home every day. Later, he learned the erhu from his old friend. When he was unhappy, he would play two out-of-tune tunes. If he couldn't catch any fish, he would complain to his fishing friends for a long time. Now his blood pressure is more stable than that of many young people.

Also, don’t take supplements randomly. Don’t search “What should men eat to nourish kidneys” as soon as you turn 30? Do not pile up a pile of “energy pills” and “impotence tablets” with unknown ingredients at home. The 35-year-old man who was admitted to the hospital last month had been taking an Internet celebrity kidney-tonifying health product for half a year. His transaminase was three times the normal value, and he almost suffered drug-induced liver damage. Of course, there is also a group of people who believe that "supplementing is worse than not supplementing at all." This depends on what the supplement is - instead of spending thousands on health supplements, it is better to eat one more egg, two glasses of milk a day, and stay up late twice less. It is more effective than any supplement. If you really want to make up for it, you have to go to a doctor to take a pulse and do an examination first. Make up for whatever is missing, and don’t eat blindly.

The last thing is to find an exercise method that you can stick to. You don't have to follow the trend of getting a fitness card and forcing yourself to run five kilometers every day. The views of Chinese and Western medicine on exercise are indeed somewhat different: Western medicine recommends 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise per week, plus two strength training sessions, which should ideally bring the heart rate to 60%-70% of (220-age) ； Traditional Chinese medicine does not recommend excessive sweating. It says that "sweat is the fluid of the heart." It is enough to warm the body slightly when moving. In fact, both statements are correct. The core is "moving but not feeling tired." If you like walking, just walk for half an hour after meals every day. If you like playing badminton, ask friends to play twice a week, even if you are cleaning the house at home or growing vegetables on the balcony. Uncle Zhang never runs. He does Tai Chi for 20 minutes every morning and rides a bicycle for half an hour back and forth from fishing. He gets enough exercise and doesn’t feel guilty. He has persisted for almost ten years and has not found a single nodule in his physical examination.

Of course there are exceptions. There is a 92-year-old grandfather in the village next to my hometown. He has smoked cigarettes for 70 years and eats fatty meat every day. Now he can still go to the fields to grow corn. This kind of person who is born with a lot of genetic buffs cannot be selected out of 10,000 people. We ordinary people should not focus on individual cases like this. To put it bluntly, there is no standard answer to longevity. There is no need to compare with others who takes more expensive health care products or runs more kilometers. If you stay comfortable by yourself and have normal physical examination indicators, you are better than anything else.