While appearance is important, our inner health - the condition of our inner organs - is crucial. We can, if we must, live with aging skin that feels like parchment, or hair that looks and feels more and more like porcupine quills. But organs like the heart, the lungs, or the liver we cannot live without. They are necessary for life. And even having these organs working away inside us is not enough. They must be working well.

When organs like the heart or liver are not working well, we are not working well. And when we are not working well, we are not living well.

There is a certain redundancy built into the body. We have two kidneys, two lungs, three lobes to the liver. This means that if one kidney becomes diseased, we can get by with the other one. Or if any of these organ systems is not working at optimal capacity, we can still get by.

But in this circumstance we will find that we are far from living at optimal capacity.
We are not living a good life. We are slower, or we live in pain and discomfort, or sometimes we "just don't feel well".

This is particularly the case as our inner organs age. Because these organs do age, along with the rest of us. As in the case of skin tissue, for example, our inner organs undergo a certain amount of programmed cell death, a certain amount of shrinkage, which eventually manifests itself as partial impairment. Because of some of the built-in redundancy, however, we will not notice the effects at first. We begin aging while in our twenties, but we usually don't notice it till later. . . . (cont'd)