Ways to slow aging available now….

Today’s Post:  Thursday, 5-7-2015

There are articles and even a recent book about expensive ways to slow aging that may be available in the future.

I even read that Google invested in a research company looking into and possibly developing such things.

But even when those things do get developed if they cost many thousands of dollars or you already have passed the time they would have helped, that won’t do you much good.

But why wait?!  You can start to do the things we already know slow aging now!

You can quite literally start today or tomorrow!

Surprisingly few people know how much we already know that slows aging and is readily available now and for WAY less money than thousands of dollars.

That’s what is in this post.

The main causes of aging are things like accumulated AGE damage and senescent but not removed cells -- and the uncoiling of central DNA strands according to new research.

1. But clearly, shortened telomeres tend to cause many of those.

When you are healthy and your new cells are perfect copies of the previous ones you tend to age very little.  Telomeres are the safety caps at the end of your DNA strands.  When they are long, the important central part of your DNA stays intact and the copies are identical to the original cells.  But when the telomeres get too short to make that happen bad copies get made and not only fail to work properly they can cause problems for the remaining healthy cells.

So, the much better news is that you can do quite a number of things shown to not only keep your telomeres from shortening but even makes short ones long again!

Those things include:

a) Enabling your resilience to be higher than your stress levels and using ways to relax when that doesn't happen tends to keep long telomeres or restore them.  Practices like Tai Chi and Yoga do this and teas or supplements like lemon balm may.  (In fact, I think I saw research showing daily use of lemon balm does help keep telomeres long and slow aging in addition to its calming effects and its boost to your verbal and thinking centers.)

b)  Some foods lengthen your telomeres and in fact have been shown to make people LOOK younger and healthier!

It seems the folate that is in an abundant daily intake of organic vegetables and whole fruit combined with stopping all the harmful ingredients notably MSG is one of the strongest and safest ways to lengthen your telomeres.

People who eat at least 6 servings a day of organic vegetables and one or more pieces of organic fresh fruit have enough less of the diseased like heart disease and cancer and Alzheimer’s disease caused in part by short telomeres that this is an indirect indication that doing this slow aging.

But it gets better than that, if you include dark green vegetables like greens and yellow and orange vegetables like carrots and yams and choose organic ones, your body becomes enough pinker that you have a kind of glow of good health.  Research found when this happens people who see you KNOW you are healthy; but it’s subliminal, they don’t know why!

Moreover, by getting these nutrients from food, you don’t just get a bit of beta carotene or alpha carotene, you get megadoses of them AND you literally get hundreds of other kinds of carotenes and cofactors that make them work best to protect your health.

What happens if you stop all the bad stuff AND not only eat 6 or more servings of other vegetables but eat another 3 that are high in carotenes?

THAT experiment has been done.  In the book, the Wahls Protocol, the author found herself by doing this she was essentially able to 95% reverse a late stage and on its way to being terminal case of MS.

But when other people began to use her protocol she was astounded to see that the ones who followed it well began to LOOK YOUNGER!

c)  And, there are supplements you can take each of which has other health benefits that also lengthen telomeres.

Those include alpha lipoic acid, NAC – n-acetyl cysteine, and astragalus.

Alpha lipoic acid is an anti-oxidant that is soluble in both water and in oils so it protects your whole body.  It also helps lower or prevent high blood sugar which by glycating, gumming up with sugars, the proteins you are made of is a directly anti-aging effect.

Taking NAC causes your body to release glutathione which is perhaps your body’s most effective health protecting and improving substance.

And, the herb astragalus is an effective booster for your immune system.  This helps you be sick less and recover faster and reduces damage from illness to help slow aging. BUT it also does this in part by directly increasing the amount of telomerase your body makes.  And telomerase is the messenger that lengthens your telomeres!

d)  Doing regular vigorous exercise most days of every week without overdoing it and being more than your body can recover from was shown a few years ago to slow aging, slash heart disease and cancer AND besides staying in good health, the people who did it were healthy at the age the matched people who did no exercise died!  We’ll get to the other way this slows aging; but it very clearly caused the telomeres of the people who exercised to become or stay longer!

And, separate research found that the more years in a row you did such exercise every week the stronger the effect was measured to be!

2.  Part two IS keeping your mitochondria healthy and having enough of them.

Mitochondria are in each of your cells and are the power supply for it.  If you have lots of them and they are in good health as they are in a healthy 8 year old, in a very real sense you ARE youthful.

Some people over 80 no longer are able to move and have very little energy because 97% of their mitochondria are gone or no longer working.  (Some also are frail and no longer strong enough to move because they did so little strength training they no longer have enough muscles to move their bodies.)

But your body stops making the active form of CoQ10, ubiquinol, that keeps your mitochondria in good health and if you are unfortunate enough to take statins which deplete ubiquinol you age much more quickly on top of that.

Ubiquinol, NOT taking statins, and regular vigorous exercise most days of every week keep mitochondria healthy.  (The actions that slow aging cut the death rate from heart disease far more than taking statins does.  And, it’s not even close eating more vegetables alone works as much as 24 times better!)

Even better, you can now take ubiquinol supplements and boost the health of your mitochondria directly.  (I take 100 mg each morning and 100 mg at lunch each day.)

What about doing vigorous exercise most days of every week?  Separate research has found that exercised muscles somehow cause genetic messages that prevent the exercised muscle cells from aging or losing mitochondria! This effect can be found within 8 weeks of starting such exercises too.

But there is now a second way to have healthy mitochondria.  They die off or become senescent and not only no longer function well begin to reduce the effectiveness of the remaining healthy ones

But we have the solution to that problem now!

Researchers at UC Davis were able to show that a food ingredient PQQ causes your body make new mitochondria which enables you to stay more energetic and mobile and youthful even when you are over 80 or 90 years old.

Not only that but Dr Al Sears found research that PQQ ALSO helps your body remove senescent cells and damaged cells possibly including precancerous cells.

So if you exercise, avoid statin drugs totally, take ubiquinol, and take PQQ you can slow your rate of aging dramatically and you can stay mobile, energetic, and independent at ages where people who don’t are using walkers or in bed in a nursing home!

3.  Another way to prevent or reverse aging is to cut way down on glycation of your cells.  Glycation is where the proteins in your body have so much sugars stuck to them they no longer work properly.

Exercise and taking alpha lipoic acid and avoiding ALL the harmful things that cause blood sugar surges and cutting way down on sugar to 5% or even 2% of calories all help stop this from happening to your cells.

In addition it turns out that eliminating or sharply cutting back on foods that have been cooked or overcooked at high heat also cuts down on this problem.

Eating some foods raw and some foods steamed and some foods boiled or poached avoids this problem.

Sautéing at a low temperature to frying gently just a bit higher temp than that are almost OK as well.

Cooking slowly at a low heat for a longer time such as in a Crockpot also works well.

4.  Separate research found that people who make an effort to look younger and continue doing many things that people younger than they are do actually age more slowly!

Conclusion:

Besides doing the things that protect your health in other ways some of which do these things AND doing the things that slow aging for you directly, you CAN slow aging dramatically.

And you can begin NOW.  You don’t have to wait or future research.