Healthy Life Extension

Do Super Bowls Make You Super Sick?

posted on February 08, 2011

I want everyone to get the message.

Sunday was an enjoyable day for me. Although sports plays a very small part in my life these days, there’s something special about Super Sunday… especially when my favorite team plays.

So watching the game itself was a fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon. But I’m not as big a fan of the commercials.

They have taken on a life of their own. And at $2.6 million a pop for a 30 second commercial, who can ignore them? That’s what advertisers count on. And that’s what can make you sick.

Let’s face it, no matter how resistant you think you might be to advertising, these ads are seductive. People talk about them and write about them long afterward, and every time you’re exposed to them, their messages get buried deeper into your subconscious.

That’s great if the products benefit you in some way. But many of the commercials sell something that will slow you down, undermine your health and possibly shorten your already too short of a life. Consumables like these:

1. Fast foods
2. Soft drinks
3. Beer
4. Pizza
5. Highly processed snacks

 

Then, what do most people do during a game? That’s right. They kick back and indulge in numbers 1-5, often starting hours before the game and continuing hours later. They also tend to eat way too much while reinforcing negative habits.

Reason, in www.fightingaging.org, recently commented on “eating yourself to death, slowly":

"Advancing medical technology has brought tremendous and accelerating benefits to health and longevity over the past century. The staggering increases in wealth that support that advance introduce more subtle forms of risk to health and wellbeing, however—disease and ill health that is more a matter of what we do to ourselves than what is done to us by various pathogens. Type 2 diabetes, for example, is a lifestyle condition that is essentially caused by eating too much over a long enough period of time.

Adopt the right lifestyle and you are very unlikely to suffer its effects. Yet so very many people have type 2 diabetes—and as the population of various regions of the world move from being poor to being wealthy, they suffer ever more from these sorts of medical conditions, even as their lifespans increase.

"It is clearly the case that failing to be more successful and wealthy than your ancestors is worse than having the opportunity to eat yourself into an expensive and debilitating degenerative condition—but why sabotage the benefits that you do have? Most of us should know better, but the siren call of low-cost calories and luxurious laziness is very effective. Still, it is a choice. We have willpower and the free will with which to use it. You can blame your genes and circumstances if you like, but that's just as much a choice as it is to surmount those challenges to stay lean and healthy."

Well said reason.

This is exactly what many of the commercials reinforce. And consider the double whammy. How many people skipped their exercise for the day so they could sit in front of the tube for hours on end?

More from Reason:

Exercise, like calorie restriction, produces measurable benefits in health and identifiable changes in our metabolism. Just as researchers have been working to mimic the effects of calorie restriction, so too are they working to produce exercise mimetic drugs:

"The driving idea here is that people will pay for medical technologies that provide some of the benefits of calorie restriction or exercise without the need for the hard work and willpower involved in the real thing. This seems like a reasonable conjecture, and so plenty of money is flowing into research and development for calorie restriction and exercise mimetic drugs. Where this research starts is the search for genes or proteins that can be manipulated to trigger some of the specific, measurable health or longevity benefits resulting from these lifestyle choices."

"By tweaking a single gene, scientists have mimicked in sedentary mice the heart-strengthening effects of two weeks of endurance training. The genetic manipulation spurred the animals' heart muscle cells—called cardiomyocytes—to proliferate and grow larger by an amount comparable to normal mice that swam for up to three hours a day."
Alright, so there’s hope yet for the couch potatoes. But not now. Someday, technology may let you eat all you want while staying lean and healthy, and it may even give you a relaxing way to reap the benefits of exercise. Meanwhile, we have to be proactive if you want to dodge diabetes, heart disease, cancer, looking and feeling crappy… and more. Honor and maintain your body, be patient, and one of these days, you won’t need to pay as much attention to your lifestyle to grow and thrive.

Am I suggesting you not take days off to indulge? Not at all. I’m just saying the more you indulge, the easier it is to slip into a lifestyle that counters longevity. The Fox network did seem to help this Super Sunday. I noticed more car ads and less food and beverage commercials this year. Is this a trend? Let’s hope.

Long Life,
David Kekich
____________________________

LATEST HEADLINES FROM FIGHT AGING!

STEM CELLS FROM FAT TO TREAT HEART DAMAGE Friday, February  4, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/02/stem-cells-from-fat-to-treat-heart-damage.php
From the MIT Technology Review: "Starting this month, a new European trial aims to determine whether stem cells harvested from a person's own fat, delivered shortly after a heart attack, could prevent some of the cardiac muscle damage that results from blocked arteries. During a heart attack, blood vessels that deliver blood to the heart muscle are blocked, and the lack of oxygen slowly kills the tissue. San Diego-based Cytori Therapeutics has developed a treatment that aims to prevent much of that muscle damage before it starts. It works by injecting a concentrated slurry of stem cells and other regenerative cells isolated from the patient's body directly into the heart's main artery within 24 hours after an attack. Time is muscle. The quicker you get in, the better. You can't do anything about dead tissue, but tissue that's bruised and damaged - that's revitalizable.

If you can get new blood flow in there, that tissue comes back to life. Fat tissue has its own population of stem cells that are more easily accessible and far more abundant than the ones in bone marrow. A typical sample of bone marrow yields about 5,000 stem cells; a sample of fat, gathered quickly through liposuction, can provide up to 200 times that amount. Fat tissue has been used for years by very astute surgeons, who just pulled pieces of fat into areas that weren't healing well. All the data so far has shown that these cells are safe, but beyond that, what are these cells doing? We just don't know. Cytori began a large-scale trial this month and hopes to test the procedure on 360 patients. The company aims to start large-scale clinical trials on heart attack patients in the United States by 2014 and on patients with chronic heart failure even earlier than that."

PROGRESS IN BIOENGINEERED VEINS Thursday, February  3, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/02/progress-in-bioengineered-veins.php
From KurzweilAI.net: "New research [demonstrates] the capability of tissue-engineered vascular grafts that are immediately available at the time of surgery and are less likely to become infected or obstructed. A surgeon could pull a new human vein off the shelf for use in life-saving vascular surgeries. The bioengineering method of producing veins shows promise in large- and small-diameter applications, such as for coronary artery bypass surgery and for vascular access in hemodialysis. This new type of bioengineered vein allows them to be easily stored in hospitals so they are readily available to surgeons at the time of need. Currently, grafting using the patient's own veins remains the gold standard. But, harvesting a vein from the patient's leg can lead to complications, and for patients who don't have suitable veins, the bioengineered veins could serve as an important new way to provide a coronary bypass. In this research, scientists generated bioengineered veins in a bioreactor - a device designed to support a biological environment - and then stored them up to 12 months in refrigerated conditions. The bioengineered veins, 3 millimeters to 6 millimeters in diameter, demonstrated excellent blood flow and resistance to blockage in large animal models for up to a year. Not only are bioengineered veins available at the time of patient need, but the ability to generate a significant number of grafts from a cell bank will allow for a reduction in the final production costs, as compared to other regenerative medicine strategies. While there is still considerable research to be done before a product is available for widespread use, we are highly encouraged by the results outlined in this paper and eager to move forward with additional study."

AN EXAMPLE OF THE IMPORTANCE OF MITOCHONDRIAL DAMAGE Thursday, February  3, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/02/an-example-of-the-importance-of-mitochondrial-damage.php
Damage to our mitochondrial DNA is one of the root causes of aging, and here is a specific example of such damage associated with an age-related condition - all the more reason to aggressively fund repair strategies such as protofection and mitoSENS. From the paper: "Mitochondrial DNA damage may be associated with age-related diseases, such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD). The present study was designed to test whether the frequency of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) damage, heteroplasmic mtDNA mutations, and repair capacity correlates with progression of AMD. Macular and peripheral RPE cells were isolated and cultured from human donor eyes with and without AMD history. The stages of AMD were graded according to the Minnesota Grading System. To test the mtDNA repair capacity, cultured RPE cells were allowed to recover for 3 and 6 hours after exposure to H(2)O(2) and then repair assessed by quantitative PCR. The levels of human OGG1 protein, which is associated with mtDNA repair, were analyzed by Western Blot. Our study showed that mtDNA damage increased with aging, and more lesions occurred in RPE cells from the macular region relative to the periphery. Furthermore, mtDNA repair capacity decreased with aging, with less mtDNA repair capacity in the macular region compared with the periphery in samples from aged subjects. Most interestingly, the mtDNA damage is positively correlated with the grading level of AMD, while repair capacity is negatively correlated. In addition, more mitochondrial heteroplasmic mutations were detected in eyes with AMD. Our data show macula-specific increases in mtDNA damage, heteroplasmic mutations and diminished repair that are associated with aging and AMD severity."

SENS FOUNDATION ON IMMUNE SYSTEM REJUVENATION Wednesday, February  2, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/02/sens-foundation-on-immune-system-rejuvenation.php
From the SENS Foundation: "The degenerative aging of the immune system is responsible for an enormous burden of disease and disability, from the pain of recurrent Herpes zoster and postherpetic neuralgia, to elevated rates of chronic urinary tract infections, to complications in wounds, pressure sores, ulcers, and surgical incisions. Most prominently, it underlies the meteoric rise in mortality from respiratory infections with age: influenza, pneumonia, and septicemia rise from being negligible causes of death in healthy middle-aged adults in the USA, to emerge amongst the top 10 causes of death in adults over the age of 55, with mortality rates climbing with each successive year of aging. And in addition to increasing the morbidity and mortality specifically attributable to particular infections, the dysregulation of immune function by immunosenescence is widely acknowledged to exacerbate multiple chronic age-related illnesses, and to contribute to functional decline and frailty in aging people. While vaccine manufacturers and public health officials have rightly advocated for expansion of population vaccine coverage as a measure to blunt the burden of infectious disease in the elderly, the effectiveness of this strategy is itself limited by immunosenescence, which progressively diminishes the adaptive immune system's response to vaccination with age. The solution to age-related suffering and death from specific infections, autoimmunity, and inflammation is the application of rejuvenation biotechnology to the aging immune system itself. The clearest and longest-established contributor to immune senescence is the decline in adaptive immunity mediated by T lymphocytes, the biomedical remediation of which has therefore been the focus of SENS Foundation's investments in immunological rejuvenation research."

AGES AND ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE Wednesday, February  2, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/02/ages-and-alzheimers-disease.php
It can be argued that advanced glycation endproducts play an important role in Alzheimer's disease, as well as other degenerations of aging. Here is a review paper on the topic: "Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common dementia disorder of later life. Although there might be various different triggering events in the early stages of the disease, they appear to converge on a few characteristic final pathways in the late stages, characterized by inflammation and neurodegeneration. Here, we review the hypothesis that advanced glycation end products (AGEs), which reflect carbonyl stress, an imbalance between the production of reactive carbonyl compounds and their detoxification, can serve as biomarkers for the progression of disorder. AGE modification may explain many of the neuropathological and biochemical features of AD, such as extensive protein cross-linking shown as amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, inflammation, oxidative stress and neuronal cell death. Although accumulation of AGEs is a normal feature of aging, it appears to be significantly accelerated in AD. We suggest that higher AGE concentrations in brain tissue and in cerebrospinal fluid might be able to distinguish between normal aging and AD." Effective removal of AGEs through strategies such as bioremediation is one part of the SENS research agenda.

EXERCISE IMPROVES MEMORY AND BRAIN HEALTH Tuesday, February  1, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/02/exercise-improves-memory-and-brain-health.php
Yet another reason to keep up with your exercise routine: "A new study shows that one year of moderate physical exercise can increase the size of the brain's hippocampus in older adults, leading to an improvement in spatial memory. [This] is considered the first study of its kind focusing on older adults who are already experiencing atrophy of the hippocampus, the brain structure involved in all forms of memory formation. The scientists recruited 120 sedentary older people without dementia and randomly placed them in one of two groups - those who began an exercise regimen of walking around a track for 40 minutes a day, three days a week, or those limited to stretching and toning exercises. Magnetic resonance images were collected before the intervention, after six months, and at the end of the one-year study. The aerobic exercise group demonstrated an increase in volume of the left and right hippocampus of 2.12 percent and 1.97 percent, respectively. The same regions of the brain in those who did stretching exercises decreased in volume by 1.40 and 1.43 percent, respectively. Spatial memory tests were conducted for all participants at the three intervals. Those in the aerobic exercise group showed improved memory function, when measured against their performance at the start of the study, an improvement associated with the increased size of the hippocampus. The authors also examined several biomarkers associated with brain health, including brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a small molecule that is involved in learning and memory. They found that the increases in hippocampal size were associated with increased amounts of BDNF. We think of the atrophy of the hippocampus in later life as almost inevitable. But we've shown that even moderate exercise for one year can increase the size of that structure. The brain at that stage remains modifiable."

SKIN CELLS DIRECTLY CONVERTED TO BEATING HEART CELLS Monday, January 31, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/01/skin-cells-directly-converted-to-beating-heart-cells.php
From ScienceDaily: "scientists have converted adult skin cells directly into beating heart cells efficiently without having to first go through the laborious process of generating embryonic-like stem cells. The powerful general technology platform could lead to new treatments for a range of diseases and injuries involving cell loss or damage, such as heart disease, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's disease. This work represents a new paradigm in stem cell reprogramming. We hope it helps overcome major safety and other technical hurdles currently associated with some types of stem cell therapies. Scientists have been trying to develop ways to 'reprogram' adult human cells back to a more embryonic-like, or pluripotent, state, from which they are able to divide and then change into any of the body's cell types. Although the technology to generate these cells, dubbed induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, represents a major advance, there are some hurdles to overcome before it can be adapted to therapies. [researchers] decided to try to tweak the process by completely bypassing the iPS stage and going directly from one type of mature cell (a skin cell) to another (a heart cell). The protocol is fundamentally different from what has been done by other scientists in the past [and] giving the cells a different kind of signal could turn them into brain cells or pancreatic cells."

Back to Top