High leverage ways to live longer, part 4....

Today's Post: Monday, 12-12-2011

There are many ways to live longer but some give you a larger return than others.

I thought an interesting post would be to list the ones that give you the most leverage.

Some are easy, some are easy for some people but hard for others, and some take a lot of work for anyone who does them.

The overall strategy is to watch for these strategies and begin to use them yourself when you find them.

Or, if it’s something you used to do, when you see it again, resume doing it!

Tuesday, 12-6-2011 we posted the first 8 strategies.

Thursday, 12-8-2011 we posted 3 strategies.

Those were 9, 10, & 11 which have to do with stress. (Those were effective ways to avoid stress, effective ways to escape or lessen stress, and how to keep the stress left over from harming you.)

The one in today’s post, #12, is different but can be very health protective as well. And one kind of it has been tested to somewhat reverse aging.

(We posted the first part of #12 last Friday, 12-9-2011.)

Doing the first 11 is dramatically effective. Just by doing those you can slow aging, live longer, and have many more healthy years.

One man who did them all lived to be 96 and was in good health until about the last month or so of his life. His healthy years were over about 30 years more than was average for men born the year he was.

So, he lived as an adult in good health almost TWICE as many years as the average man. And he did live double the number of healthy years of the men who messed up on just a few of the more important of these strategies.

So if you do all of these, the postive effect on your life can be huge.

At this writing though, there is one MORE way to live longer and have more years of healthy life in addition to the first 11.

12. There are 3 categories.

a) For almost every kind of chronic disease, there are additional supplements you can take that make that disease less likely for you. Some of these can even help reverse these diseases in their early stages. Even better, many supplements have multiple health benefits.

Many of our posts on preventing specific diseases include the supplements that help prevent that disease.

Taking many of these supplements can prevent you from dying or becoming disabled by preventing these diseases. That both helps you live longer and have more healthy years of life too.

b) There are also some supplements that help you maintain youthful abilities even though you have aged.

(Of the first 8 ways, regular exercise, well done has exactly this effect. In fact, exercised muscles almost don’t age at all on the cellular level research found.)

c) There is one supplement that actually can partially halt or reverse aging -- and has even been tested to partially reverse aging -- by making your telomeres longer.

(Since it IS expensive, that’s why it’s nice you can achieve much of the same effect in slowing aging by using the stress protective methods we covered yesterday.)


a) Here’s more on the first one:

For almost every kind of chronic disease, there are additional supplements you can take that make that disease less likely for you. Some of these can even help reverse these diseases in their early stages. Even better, many supplements have multiple health benefits.

Many of our posts on preventing specific diseases include the supplements that help prevent that disease.

Taking many of these supplements can prevent you from dying or becoming disabled by preventing these diseases. That both helps you live longer and have more healthy years of life too.

Last time we posted on 3 supplements that have large and multiple benefits in preventing disease.

Here are some of the other supplements helpful for preventing particular diseases.

(Last time we covered supplements that help prevent heart disease, supplements that help prevent cancer, & supplements that help prevent Alzheimer’s and mental decline.

We’ll cover supplements to help prevent or reverse type 2 diabetes and to prevent osteoporosis.

For preventing type 2 diabetes, the two biggest levers are to eat right and get regular, vigorous exercise. NOT eating or drinking the foods and drinks that spike blood sugar is the most important factor. And, regular, vigorous exercise is also essential. Once you do those, adding 200 mg of alpha lipoic acid or 100 mg of r-lipoic acid each day can help. So can taking 200 iu a day of chromium polynicotinate. (Solgar makes that supplement.)

(I already did regular, vigorous exercise when I was tested to have a fasting blood sugar of 115. My doctor told me how dangerous that was, particularly if it got worse. I cut out half my sugar intake, switched to no sugar added apple sauce and began taking 200 mg of alpha lipoic acid and 200 iu a day of chromium polynicotinate. My fasting blood sugar dropped to 87 and has remained 96 or less ever since.)

Supplements and actions to prevent osteoporosis and hip fractures is a subject with new information just in the last few years. The three most important steps are NOT supplements.

The first one is to do weight bearing exercise and strength training several times each week. Those cause your body to make your bones heavier and stronger. NOT doing that causes your body to gradually make your bones lighter and weaker. So, it may be THE most important thing to do.

The second one is to virtually never drink soft drinks and to drink cola drinks even less. They contain phosphoric acid that leaches the calcium out of your bones and weakens them. (Taking antacid or proton pump inhibitor drugs daily prevents your body from absorbing some of the key nutrients and makes taking compensatory supplements virtually mandatory to prevent bone weakness and fractures.)

The third one is to eat foods high in calcium and magnesium almost every day to several times each day. Low fat dairy foods and canned salmon including the bones are quite high in calcium. And nuts and greens and beans and lentils are high in magnesium and have some calcium.

It used to be thought that taking calcium as a supplement was a good idea to help prevent osteoporosis. Many doctors still recommend this. But there are two problems with that. The resulting surge of calcium tends to stick onto any plaque in your blood vessels and worsen high blood pressure and increase your risk of heart attack somewhat new studies found. The second problem with taking calcium supplements is that it’s ineffective without other nutrients that ARE effective without that much extra calcium from more than food sources.

So what supplements do help prevent osteoporosis and bone fractures?

Taking 400 to 800 mg a day of magnesium along with 4,000 to 8,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 IS effective. And, when combined with strength training and weight bearing exercise and eating FOODS with calcium, it can even protect you from taking antacid or proton pump inhibitor drugs daily.

Lastly, if you do not eat dairy food and you think or your doctor thinks you should take calcium supplements, there are some safer ways to do it. Do NOT take calcium supplements on an empty stomach. Only take them at the end of a meal that has some fiber to slow down the rate that they go into your blood stream. It also makes sense to take only 250 mg per meal. And, if you can, take calcium from one of the supplements that get it from seaweed because it is in a form your body absorb better and more slowly because it is a concentrated food source of calcium. Lastly, taking the calcium will be ineffective unless you also take magnesium and vitamin D3 and do weight bearing exercise and strength training and avoid soft drinks! The vitamin D3, taking the magnesium, and the exercise are all essential. And NOT drinking soft drinks is almost as important.

b) Supplements that can reverse some the effects of aging.

The most important supplement in this category is a natural substance in your boy that young people have enough of and older people almost always do not. Worse, the people who take statin drugs cause dangerously low levels of it by doing so.

It’s a substance called ubiquinol that your body makes from the CoQ10 in many protein foods. Ubiquinol is to the power source of each of your cells what gasoline is to an engine that uses it for fuel. Ubiquinol keeps the mitochondria, the power source inside each of your cells, healthy and operating at full strength.

You have less energy and each of your cells operates poorly if your mitochondria aren’t working well. They don’t if your ubiquinol levels fall from aging or from statin intake.

Initially, researchers and doctors tried CoQ10 supplements. Often they were ineffective. Then when they used 200 to 300 mg a dose with some kind of oil or fat and had people take that three or four times a day, they got good results. People had more energy, their hearts beat more strongly, and their cells worked better.

That was a bit expensive though. THEN it was discovered that having people take the ubiquinol as a supplement that your body turns CoQ10 into and actually uses, made dramatic improvements. You only needed to take a fourth as much and it lasted twice as long in your blood stream. So instead of taking 200 to 400 mg a day of CoQ10 three or four times a day, you could, and at this writing still can, take 50 to 100 mg of ubiquinol once or twice a day.

This makes statin drugs dramatically safer to take and reduces the feeling of energy depletion many experience due ubiquinol depletion from taking statins.

For people who protect their hearts in other effective ways, taking 50 to 100 mg of ubiquinol once or twice a day does more. Their energy levels and the way their body operates both far closer to what they were when the people were younger.

So taking ubiquinol essentially prevents aging from slowing you down as much as you otherwise would experience.

Supplements thought to directly slow or reverse aging is the next subject.

Experiments on mice found that giving them ubiquinol supplements dramatically slowed aging. As far as I know, that’s not yet been duplicated in a study of people. But since it does help me function at a more youthful level and this experiment found those results, I take 100 mg of ubiquinol at breakfast and 50 mg at lunch each day.

DHEA and resveratrol were both thought to slow aging or extend life.

Moderate amounts, such as taking 25 mg a day to 100 mg a day of DHEA depending on how old you are, does seem to help keep your testosterone and growth hormones closer to youthful levels. I’ve not yet seen evidence that taking DHEA slows aging or extends life as regular exercise does however. It might though. So I’m glad I take it.

Resveratrol, a nutrient in red wine and some other foods, was though to duplicate the cellular effect of mild but chronic calorie shortage in slowing aging.

The promise was that you could eat more normally and still age more slowly and extend your life by taking resveratrol for that reason.

So, far taking resveratrol seems to have failed the tests indicating it actually does this.

BUT, resveratrol does have moderately strong heart protective effects. And, it may work better with cofactors found in red wine to protect your heart. So taking 100 mg a day of trans resveratrol and moderate drinking of red wine, may not slow aging. But it will improve your heart protection and help you prevent having your life your energy levels cut by heart problems.

So taking ubiquinol and DHEA and resveratrol can help you function as if you are younger and may also slow aging somewhat. The proven benefits make them worth taking. And if they help you slow aging too, that’s a bonus.

c) There is one supplement that actually can partially halt or reverse aging -- and has even been tested to partially reverse aging -- by making your telomeres longer.

(Since it IS expensive, that’s why it’s nice you can achieve much of the same effect in slowing aging by using the stress protective methods we covered yesterday.)

There are several components of aging. But having your telomeres gradually get too short does look like the basic cause.

It’s actually simple in concept. If your cells make perfect copies as they tended to when you were 16 to 24 years old you’d stay that physical age.

But at the end of each strand of the DNA you need the perfect copies made from is a shoelace cap like structure called a telomere. If they are still there and long enough, your DNA copies stay perfect. You tend to stay well and have no aging.

But the telomeres gradually wear down or shorten faster due to illness or stress. When that begins to cause imperfect copies due to short or missing telomeres, you become prone to diseases and your body ages as it begins to have defective cells.

This is what makes the 3 ways to reduce stress so important. Particularly if you do Tai Chi or other comparably effective stress relievers, it makes your telomeres stay considerably longer.

(Avoiding tobacco smoke and getting regular exercise also likely have this effect too. That’s because tobacco smoke clearly speeds aging and regular exercise is proven to slow aging in several ways.)

But your body make a compound called telomerase that either makes your telomeres longer or keeps them from getting shorter or both.

And, there is a special extract of the herbal supplement astragalus that causes your body to release more telomerase.

Dr Al Sears has tried using this supplement on himself and his patients. The results on the effectiveness of their immune systems and ability to exercise and recover from doing so, suggest taking it not only slows aging but may partially reverse it.

At this writing, Dr Sears sells that supplement. But it costs over $300 a month. So, you have to have more money than most people to try it.

See www.alsearsmd.com .

So far I can’t afford to try that one, so I’m learning Tai Chi instead. But if the price goes down, it remains available, and I begin to make enough money, I may get some pretests and try it for several months and see if the post tests show the predicted effects.