the Case for Pleasure in Aging

INTRODUCTION
Georges M. Halpern is an MD [Internal Medicine & Allergy/ Immunology] and a PhD/DSc [Pharmaceutical Sciences]. He is Professor Emeritus of Medicine, and Nutrition, University of California, Davis. He has worked/lectured in 76 countries. Currently, he is Distinguished Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He focuses his current research on the positive role of Pleasure. He is a Commander in the French National Order of the Mérite Agricole for his original contributions to enology and French cuisine.

The Case for Pleasure in Aging

Abstract
While stress may make you sick and belief could make you well, there’s more than self-help guides to consult –and trust. If some foods, e.g. yogurt, have been inducted into the “Health Hall-of-Fame”, further scrutiny shows that we only eat what we like, and the healthiest concoction will take a shortcut to the garbage bin if it does not titillate our senses. Sweetness induces analgesia at all ages. Chocolate beats Prozac？ and wine beats Valium？ -because we enjoy them! Moderate, enjoyable exercise –including sex- upregulates the immune response; while guilt makes you sick. But the food-and-beverage industry has taken notice and plays on our hedonistic cravings to get customers dive into addiction -and obesity.
Since our immune response tends to lose efficacy and focus as we age, we must keep pleasure awake to prevent age-related chronic inflammatory disease and its multiple versions.
Pleasure is not an “extra”, or bonus bringing a little more soul to certain of our acts; it is a fundamental part of our animal life. It is just as difficult to define as spirit, but nonetheless humans are very conscious of it.
Pleasure is a potent drive, inducing forms of behavior adapted to physiological needs, e.g. temperature regulation and food-and-fluid intake; sensory pleasure is an incentive to  useful behavior, and maximization of pleasure the answer to physiological conflicts.