New ways to prevent or slow aging AND prevent diseases....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 10-4-2011

You are made out of self-renewing cells. When the DNA in the new cells is identical to the originals, you stay well and age little or not at all.

Recently it was found that each strand of DNA has shoe lace cap like sections at the ends that help keep the critical DNA in the middle able to make perfect copies. These are called telomeres.

When they are long enough, you stay well and hardly age at all. When they get shorter you get more diseases and age faster. That’s because you begin to be made out of partially defective cells!)

So, to prevent many diseases and slow aging, it clearly is worth it to find out what makes your telomeres shorter or longer.

Keeping your telomeres long helps avoid heart disease, cognitive decline, depression, cataracts, and type 2 diabetes.

1. Perhaps the best stress reliever known is doing Tai Chi daily. It also acts as a mild whole body exercise and burns as many calories while you do it as walking. Of the actions you can take, this one is extremely valuable. One study I read of said doing this increases the length of your telomeres by 43%.

Thanks to the email I get from Dr Al Sears, here is a list of other things you can do. Many of them take less time to do than Tai Chi and all of them are relatively easy to do.

(Dr Al Sears also sells an expensive supplement that causes your body to release telomerase which directly lengthens telomeres.

But if you aren’t unusually well to do, you can still do all these other things which are almost that effective if you do all of them.)

Here are the other things he recommends. (I’ve added a bit to his info as well.)

2. Prevent gum disease. Gum disease shortens your telomeres and directly causes heart disease.

This takes just a few minutes each day and part of it your dental hygienist can show you how to do if you haven’t yet learned it.

At least once every single day, floss in between your teeth and along their edges on both sides of the gap in between your teeth.

Then at least once every single day, brush your teeth in a way that mostly brushes your gums where your teeth come out of them and then brush your gums directly.

Then if you possibly can, get your teeth cleaned every 6 months.

(This also helps minimize bad breath. And it will help you keep your teeth and avoid the cost of having them pulled or replaced with false teeth as well.)

3. Get vigorous exercise most days of every week.

Based on the results from multiple studies, this directly lengthens your telomeres. You age much more slowly and get far fewer diseases!

4. Avoid or reverse obesity.

The exercise just mentioned helps enormously to do just that.

But the second part is to minimize sweet treats and even more important to virtually eliminate fattening foods and drinks including all soft drinks, virtually all foods made of refined grains or high fructose corn syrup, or artificial sweeteners, or which have hydrogenated oils or oils high in omega 6 added to them.

This includes French fries, potato chips, any bread not made of 100 % whole grains, all packaged desserts, virtually all commercially baked goods, and all packaged snacks.

Eat a diet high in real foods such as health OK protein foods and extra virgin olive oil and lots of nonstarchy vegetables, particularly the cruciferous ones, and some fresh fruit.

Watching far less TV than most people helps with both parts. You then have time to exercise. And you avoid watching the ads for the things that will make you fat that run on TV.

Eating processed meats that include nitrites and eating meats from animals fed grain, particularly their fat, shortens telomeres.

Eat plant protein foods like raw nuts if you aren’t allergic, and beans and lentils and animal protein foods from naturally fed animals such as 100 % grass fed beef, pasture fed poultry, and wild caught fish to avoid this.

5. Do things that increase your HDL cholesterol. People with high HDL have longer telomeres. They also are known to have less heart disease and live longer!

Take some niacin daily. Even taking 250 to 300 mg once a day after a meal will help. Taking twice that is more effective by doing it after two meals a day. Research has found people live longer who do this; and it is strongly heart protective. Your HDL goes up and your more harmful LDL & triglycerides go down. (Taking more than 1,000 mg a day of niacin is possible but can cause liver problems. So if you want to do that, you need to work with your doctor.)

I’ve found that doing all these HDL boosting things and taking about 1,000 mg a day of niacin keeps my HDL in the very high 89 to 96 range.

Get extra choline in food once a day. The yolk in whole eggs is high in choline. And, if you can eat wheat, wheat germ is quite high in choline.

Eating garlic or taking deodorized garlic may not lower total cholesterol but doing this and/or eating onions does boost HDL.

Get vigorous exercise most days of every week. The longer you have done this, the better the effect is on boosting your HDL because every year you exercise this way the higher your HDL gets!

Drink moderately. Red wine has other heart benefits. But the key thing is to avoid heavy drinking which can cause other problems and even severe problems. This too will increase HDL. And the moderate stress relief you get may help keep your telomeres long directly also.

6. Totally avoid tobacco smoke. It not only produces cardiovascular disease in everyone exposed to it, it causes 30% of all cancers. But that’s not all. Tobacco smoke also speeds aging and shortens your telomeres!

7. As I write this the FDA has proposed making most supplements unavailable.

If that happens, you may be deprived of doing this next step.

But for now and later if the FDA is talked out of doing that or prevented from doing that, you can do two more things.

Take 500 mg of vitamin C a few times each day. This has been shown to keep your telomeres long.

How high your homocysteine reading is varies with how long or short your telomeres are. Since tobacco smoke speeds aging and shortens your telomeres, it’s no surprise that it causes your homocysteine reading to go up.

For existing and severe heart disease, taking the supplements that lower homocysteine has failed to reverse it. But the jury is still out on preventing heart disease before the damage is done. And there are studies that show taking these supplements to lower homocysteine before the damage is done, do make cognitive decline less likely.

Taking 500 to 1,000 mcg a day of vitamin B12 sublingually so your absorption of it is direct is the best way since it works even if you take reflux drugs or don’t digest your food well.

This helps prevent mental decline directly in addition to lowering your homocysteine.

The other supplements that lower homocysteine include, 800 mcg a day of folic acid, 25 to 75 mg a day total of vitamin B6 (but NOT 100 mg a day or more), and a two to 25 mg a day of vitamin B2, riboflavin.

500 to 1,000 mg a day of N-acetyl cysteine, NAC and 500 to 750 mg a day of tri-methyl glycine, TMG also lower homocysteine. And the NAC has been shown to be directly protective to your brain besides.

Look younger, be healthier, and live longer....

Today's Post: Thursday, 1-13-2011

Believe it or not, there are FIVE ways to do that triple of desirable things.

Here are three you likely already know about if you have been reading our posts or because they are simply better known.

1. Lose excess fat if you have it -- or avoid getting it if you don’t.

2. Get regular exercise every week, particularly vigorous exercise -- and keep doing it.

3. Completely avoid tobacco smoke -- both smoking and second hand smoke.

4. Yesterday we posted on the fact that people who eat lots of vegetables with carotenes wind up with higher blood levels of alpha carotene. Research recently found they are much less likely to die from any cause and have better health -- including being far less likely to get cancer or die from any cancers they do get.

We also covered how many other carotenes in these vegetables help too and some tips on which vegetables these are and how to add more to your food and drink.

5. Today we post on ways to keep your telomeres from getting shorter or which even restore them and make them a bit longer.

In fact staying trim, getting regular exercise, and eating lots of vegetables with carotenes likely each has this effect. And, exposure to tobacco smoke almost certainly shortens your telomeres.

(If you are unaware, here are what telomeres are and how keeping them long tends to prevent or slow aging. Aging happens when your body begins to make imperfect copies of your cells. Eventually you get cells that don’t work and have problems including death. But the DNA in your cells has a kind of shoelace cap or damage preventer at its ends. Those are called telomeres. If they are intact, your body keeps making accurate and properly functioning new cells. So keeping your telomeres long enough prevents aging. And, slowing how fast they get shorter or wear off slows aging.)

Last Tuesday, Al Sears posted on some other things that either cause your body to make more telomerase which makes telomeres longer or prevents them from getting shorter or which have been found to keep telomeres longer in that way and perhaps others.


In a long-term study, Danish researchers discovered that twins who looked younger than their chronological age had better health and longer survival rates than their older-looking twins. Also, the larger the difference in the age they looked to be, the more likely it was that the older-looking twin died first.

They also found that the twins who looked younger had longer telomeres.

Doctor Sears then listed several ways to either boost telomerase or maintain the telomere length in the DNA of your cells.

“One way is to activate telomerase. Telomerase is an enzyme found in all of your cells that tells your telomeres to rebuild themselves. Once activated, telomerase can actually make your cells – and your body – younger.”

In a recent study at the University of California-Davis, found people doing meditation had 33 percent higher telomerase activity in their white blood cells than those who weren’t meditating.

(Most people haven’t got the time to meditate or aren’t good at it. Here are two solutions:

Listen to the guided meditations on audios by Dharma Singh Khalsa, MD which are only 12 minutes long and have different themes to fit what you need most when you do them.

You can also learn Tai Chi which is a kind of slow exercise routine that both gives you the effect of mediation and provides about the same exercise as walking for the time you put in. So if you haven’t time to do both meditation AND get exercise, doing a daily Tai Chi routine can work well.)

Dr Sears then gave an even more time efficient method that also works.:

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that daily supplements of omega-3 significantly increased telomerase activity.

(Eating wild caught fish high in omega 3 oils two or three times a week also works. Two good providers of omega 3 supplements are Nordic Naturals and Carlson. I have been doing both by eating wild caught salmon three times a week and taking omega 3 supplements from Nordic Naturals twice a day.

And I was doing that for the other health benefits of omega 3 before I found it that it may also help keep me younger.)

He then listed more three things that have been found to keep your telomeres long.:

1. A new study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed that people who take a daily multivitamin had younger DNA and had 5.1 percent longer telomeres than non-users.

Dr Sears then noted this:

“When you….buy a multivitamin, stay away from discount store brands … they are inexpensive because those companies buy the cheapest, synthetic ingredients on the international market. This is one area where I don’t recommend cutting corners. Stick with a brand you know and trust.”

2. That American Journal of Clinical Nutrition study was full of good news. It turns out that vitamin B12 supplements increase telomere length.

(To get the full effect of B12 supplements get the kind you can suck on or chew and hold in your mouth a bit. That way you get the B12 directly while older people or people taking anti acid drugs may not get the B12 from digesting it. 500 mcg twice a day or 1,000 mcg once a day works.)

Vitamins C and E also increase the lifespan of cells by preventing telomere shortening.

(2,000 mg of vitamin C in four 500 mg a day works well. And, taking a natural vitamin E supplement of 200 iu a day and eating health OK foods high in the entire vitamin E complex such as walnuts, pecans, almonds, avocados, and extra virgin olive oil will work well.)

3. In another study, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition looked at more than 2,000 women of all ages.

“The more vitamin D they had in their bodies, the longer their telomeres were. On top of that, people who supplemented with vitamin D had longer telomeres than those who didn’t.5

If you’d like to get your vitamin D in a supplement, make sure it’s vitamin D3 (Cholecalciferol). I usually start my patients with 2,000 IUs a day and work up from there if blood levels aren’t responding. Blood levels are helpful to tell you how much you need to take.”

Your body will use at least 3,000 iu a day of vitamin D and other studies indicate that up to 10,000 iu a day is safe while yet others show that the real minimum amount needed for good health is the 2,000 iu a day Dr Sears begins with.

(To put it bluntly, the recent so called guidelines posted saying lower levels of vitamin D are correct was done by researchers who were either not competent enough to know the literature or all the relevant studies OR they were biased.)
Dr Sears also makes the point that the vitamins he lists are all antioxidants.

That would suggest that other antioxidant supplements would help do the job.

And, there is some evidence for that!

Dharma Singh Khalsa, MD said in a recent email that the antioxidant glutathione produced in your body by taking the supplement NAC (n-acetyl cysteine), has been found to maintain telomere length.

And, in another email, Dr Sears himself posted on research showing that taking the far more effective form of CoQ10 called ubiquinol dramatically slows aging.

(Ubiquinol is what your body turns CoQ10 into that actually does the job. It’s been found up to EIGHT times as effective to take it compared to taking CoQ10.)

Ubiquinol is both a strong antioxidant AND it slows aging by keeping the mitochondria in each of your cells delivering energy to them as it should which is also an anti-aging effect.

Best of all, just like omega 3 supplements and foods, each of these supplements has abundant OTHER health benefits that keep you healthy in other ways.