3 new ways to longevity – some you can eat….

Today's post: Tuesday, 11-20-2007

You may have read that eating a high nutrition but low calorie diet seems to produce much longer, healthier lives in both people & other animals even one celled ones.
Some people are trying that. But there are ways you can produce much the same effects without such severe calorie restriction.

The researchers found that this eating pattern triggered a genetic effect. These eating conditions turn on a family of genes called sirtuins (“silent information regulator proteins”). Sirtuins apparently produce cellular messagers that turn off or turn down the aging process at the cellular level.

Here’s two ways to help get that effect. The second one is more fun & forgiving than the first.

1. The first way to get some of this effect is to eat right for health. Without deprivation, you can eat many kinds of nonstarchy vegetables each day in salads, in main dishes, as stand alone dishes, as snacks, like cauliflower florets or radishes, or in omelets. That increases your intake of fiber & many kinds of micronutrients. If you can get them, organic vegetables are better for you.

This is one of the secrets to being less fat without feeling hungry. And, it simply makes you less hungry for the higher calorie foods you eat.

Eating many high nutrition whole fruits but not quite as many, like kiwifruit, blueberries, strawberries, & whole apples helps you to eat enough to not be hungry but not take in too many calories -- not as well as vegetables but much better than sugary or fatty foods. And, many of them taste good.

Then add health OK, high quality protein foods & health OK fats like extra virgin olive oil, nuts, & avocados. But don’t overdo the quantity.

Sharply limit or virtually eliminate sweets, baked goods, foods with refined grains, & soft drinks—both diet & regular.

This kind of eating won’t produce this anti-aging effect by itself. But it may help either turn it on some or at least not turn it off by doing the opposite. You will definitely be less fat than eating otherwise would make you.

2. Consuming a natural compound called resveratrol also has been found to trigger the anti-aging effect of sirtuins as well as calorie restriction.
One way to get it is to simply add foods & drinks high in it to what you already eat & drink. Plums, red & purple grapes, blueberries, cranberries, & concord grape juice and red wines are high in resveratrol. Recently I found out that a kind of red wine I’ve not yet tried made from muscadine grapes is quite high in resveratrol. And, virtually all red wines are good sources for it.

The good news is that this means that even drinks & foods like red wine & plum jam, sugary cranberry relish, strawberry jam, & blueberry jam may actually be good for you because of the resveratrol in them. Of course, this is ONLY true if they are made only with real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup & if you eat them in moderation. But even so, these are much healthier alternatives than other treats in part because of the resveratrol & other micronutrients they contain.

The other good news is that you can get the amount of resveratrol that looks to definitely trigger the anti-aging effect by taking supplements. Resveratrol in the trans form that does the job is now available as a supplement. Longevinex is the brand that has actually been studied as producing this anti-aging effect. But other brands may also work.

The effects of resveratrol are astonishingly powerful. They include greater energy, strength, & endurance for example. Older athletes, older exercisers, & people who like sex may really like this set of effects.

And resveratrol is also enormously protective of your health, from cutting inflammation levels that tend to produce heart disease, other vascular disease, & arthritis, to apparently sharply reducing all kinds of cancers & other degenerative diseases.

3. Lastly, taking the supplement CoQ10 tends to prevent your mitochondria, the energy producing part of your cells, from turning off as the amount your body provides drops as you get older.

And, I read of a report recently that taking the supplement Ubiquinol directly which CoQ10 metabolizes into in your body had similar effects to resveratrol in sharply slowing the rate of aging. To be sure it was rodents that were in this study not people. But the effects were striking. Those eating normally aged normally. Those also fed CoQ10 aged more slowly. And, those also fed Ubiquinol hardly aged at all in the same time period.

Since taking 100 to 200 mg a day in people increases energy level, effectively lowers high blood pressure, & tends to strengthen the heart and even may help prevent cancer, my very strong suspicion is that adding 50 mg twice a day of Ubiquinol which ensures a robust level of CoQ10 in the blood will also have this anti-aging effect in people.

There are many other supplements which may slow aging in various ways. DHEA is one as are DMAE & Carnosine which help prevent glycation of your cells from oxidation or eating too much sugar.

But resveratrol & Ubiquinol look to be in a class by themselves as to how powerful they are.

This information is new to me. But I now take both of them based on the research reports I’ve read.