Three different ways to slow aging….

Today's Post:  Thursday, 12-12-2012 

The three different ways to slow aging are:

1.  Keep your telomeres long or as long as possible:

2.  Keep the energy generating parts of all your cells, the mitochondria, alive and healthy;

3. Avoid gunking up your cells with sugars bonded to your proteins or at least minimize it.

1.  Keep your telomeres long or as long as possible

I just posted on: Meditation, Yoga, and Tai Chi….Tuesday, 12-3-2013 & how they have been found to lengthen your telomeres by as much as 43%. 

You can take the special kind of astragalus that causes your body to make more telomerase which is how your body makes your telomeres longer; but it’s several hundred dollars a month. Yoga and tai chi have other direct health benefits, can be done at no cost once you learn them; and burn calories too.

There is some evidence as well that the more intense and vigorous exercises, superslow and progressive strength training & progressive interval or variable cardio with high intensity periods alternating with rest periods lengthen your telomeres and lengthen them dramatically in your muscles—including your heart.

The super effective antioxidant your body makes called glutathione may also lengthen your telomeres.  And taking the supplement N-acetyl cysteine aka NAC and alpha or R lipoic acid cause your levels of glutathione to rise.

2.  Keep the energy generating parts of all your cells, the mitochondria, alive and healthy 

Dr Al Sears has posted that taking the four or more times more bioavailable form on CoQ10, ubiquinol has been found to dramatically slow aging because it keeps your mitochondria that you still have fully powered up.  The Life Extension Foundation notes it likely taking ubiquinol can increase your lifespan by over 10%.

(One of the many reasons to NOT take statins is that it depletes this substance and REDUCES the health of your mitochondria.  Besides the muscle damage and increased risk of type 2 diabetes, it’s quite common for older people who take statins to feel even less energetic, easily tired, and become more slow moving.)

There is some evidence as well that the more intense and vigorous exercises, superslow and progressive strength training & progressive interval or variable cardio with high intensity periods alternating with rest periods increases the health of your mitochondria and does so dramatically in your muscles—including your heart.

Now there is new evidence that even though you tend to lose mitochondria as you get older until you have as little as 5% of them left!,

-- you can make more or restore the ones that would otherwise die off by taking the substance PQQ which is in many foods notably including kiwifruit which are a superfood for many reasons if you aren’t one of the few people allergic to them. Taking 20 mg a day seems to work.  This one is only recently discovered.

But you can see that by taking each of these steps you will have more energy and your ability to move youthfully and feel energetic will be dramatically higher.  And, your heart will be far stronger. 

3.  Avoid gunking up your cells with sugars bonded to your proteins or at least minimize it

When sugars become attached to the proteins in your cells and DNA it’s called glycation.  And although your body can tolerate some of this, if it becomes excessive your cells and your DNA begin to stop working properly.

This is even worse if you have too much glycation or attached sugars to your LDL as it acts like spikes on even the normally safe large particle LDL resulting in your blood flow harming the inner surface of your blood vessels and destroying many of you much smaller capillaries.  That’s called type 2 diabetes; and this is why having it causes blindness, heart disease, high blood pressure, kidney damage, and even foot amputation if you have it too high a level for too long.

What prevents too much glycation?

a) Keep your mitochondria and keep them healthy.

Do the more intense and vigorous exercises, superslow and progressive strength training & progressive interval or variable cardio with high intensity periods alternating with rest periods increases at least two times a week each every week.

Those two things cause your body to take up and USE the sugars you take in and NOT cause glycation.

(Have you noticed that such exercises have appeared in all THREE of these methods?

Studies at Stanford found dramatic increases in lifespan AND years of healthy life in people who do these kinds of exercises every week for many years.)

b) Keep the things out of your food that cause glycation if you eat them.

Never ingest high fructose corn syrup or artificial sweeteners; and minimize your intake of real sugar.

Eat almost all zero or low glycemic foods.  Health OK protein foods are zero or close to it.  Health OK fats and oils have a glycemic index of zero. Nonstarchy vegetables are close to zero. 

And, eat NO grains or sharply minimize the grains you eat. 

Any grains you do eat should be whole grain and balanced with a zero or very low Glycemic food. 

AND, to the best extent you can manage avoid eating any hybrid or GMO wheat or flour or corn meal.  These foods are even higher in glycemic index than sugar!

Eat foods raw or very lightly cooked or slow cooked at a moderate temperature.  The protein in foods cooked too long or at too high a temperature become glycated.  Then when you eat the food, those glycated proteins are in it and tend to cause glycation in you!

AGEs, glycated proteins, tend to cause the damage they do in part because the cause chronic inflammation that is too high.

THAT means that if you do other things that avoid high chronic inflammation it minimizes the damage from the glycation you are exposed to.

It’s hard say if high HDL lowers chronic inflammation directly or because it’s a marker for less small particles of LDL that go into the molecular gaps in your blood vessel walls and cause inflammation.

Recent research suggests that besides being a marker for low amounts of small particle LDL that we already knew about, HDL may indeed lower inflammation directly TOO!

So, how do you increase your HDL level?

THE most effective method in part because it directly lowers the amount of small particle LDL in your blood is to use our old friend, doing superslow and progressive strength training & progressive interval or variable cardio with high intensity periods alternating with rest periods at least a couple of times each every week!

In fact, the more consecutive years in a row you do this, the more effectively it does this recent research found!!

Eating health OK proteins increases HDL, notably whole eggs from pasture fed hens.  Eating wild caught fish works well because eating extra omega 3 oils also increases HDL.  So does eating meat occasionally from animals fed only grass or organic sprouts.

Egg yolks contain choline which boosts HDL.  So in addition to that, you can take choline or lecithin supplements that contain choline also.

Eating organic berries and if not allergic raw, unsalted, and oil free nuts each boosts HDL.

Drinking red wine and or dark beer at low moderate to moderate levels boosts HDL.

(So does drinking high moderate levels of wine and beer.  But that tends to cause high blood pressure, deaths and economic damage from accidents and other health problems.)

You can also lower inflammation by never eating grain fed meat or poultry or eating them as close to totally fat removed as you can.  That’s because their fat contains dramatically too much omega 6 oils from the grains, mostly corn and soy, that they are fed. 

Using extra virgin olive oil or nuts or avocados instead of soy or corn or canola oil also helps avoid excessive omega 6 intake and its associated inflammation.

Here again, eating no or very little grain helps you because excessive omega 6 oils which are high in all grains promotes inflammation directly.

And, besides eating wild caught fish, you can take omega 3 oils and DHA, a kind of omega 3 oil that’s extra beneficial for your brain and nerves. 

(Walnuts and flax seeds are health OK sources for the plant based omega 3 oils. 

But the animal based omega 3 oils from fish and seafood and the much smaller foods they eat including algae and phytoplankton is dramatically more effective than the plant based kind. 

Canola oil has some plant based omega 3, but is almost all from GMO grain and WAY too high in omega 6 oils.)

If you both lower omega 6 oils AND boost omega 3 oils, you slash chronic too high inflammation AND the diseases it causes or speeds up!

Lastly you can take and cook with turmeric and ginger as they are health beneficial anti-inflammatory spices!