Healthy Life Extension

A Treasure of Longevity Info

posted on July 5, 2011

Dear Future Centenarian,

Do you want to age well? Most of us do. If you are over 50, this is a more important question than if you are 30. But I’m sure you want to avoid heart disease, cancer or dementia when you get old.

Most of the world thinks it’s normal that we’ll get these diseases.

But science today tells us this is not "normal." Our evolutionary past designed us to be active and fit until we drop dead. Why? Because raising human children takes so long. Mature adults had to do most of the hard work enable us to invest up to 25 years in our kids. (Our technology driven evolutionary future should keep us from dropping dead from aging.)

We are designed by our evolution to reach a plateau of fitness in mid life. So why do most of us not live like this?

We don't because we have strayed away from the way of living that best fits our evolution. Our culture has gotten far ahead of our biology. We eat foods that make us sick. We have lost our social identity and power, and that makes us ill. And we have lost touch with the circadian rhythms of the natural world, and that has made us sick too.

In other words, modern living has caused us to have lost our fit with our true nature.

The following site will be a Manual. It shows you what the best fit is. It shows you the science behind this. It shares with you some methods for getting your fit back with your true human nature. And it will continue to evolve. So welcome to the "Missing Human Manual."

http://MissingHumanManual.com/ 

It can help you, and I hope you can help others as a result.

Here are the opening words to the site:

“Most new comers to “Paleo” think of it as just another fad diet. And we have had so many of them. And they ALL FAIL – so why would this be any different? It is different because it is not a diet but a call for us to heal ourselves from the damage that the industrial world has done to us. Food is a big part of this, but as readers of this blog know, there is so much more.”

I urge you to invest some time in this benefit-packed site.

Long Life,
David Kekich

P.S. Now you can watch Ray Kurzweil’s blockbuster film, Transcendent Man, for just 99 cents on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Transcendent-Man/dp/B0051Y6NUQ/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=digital-video&qid=1309266698&sr=8-4
____________________________

LATEST HEADLINES FROM FIGHT AGING!

A NOVEL VIEW OF STEM CELL DECLINE Friday, July  1, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/07/a-novel-view-of-stem-cell-decline.php
An open access paper: "One of the most important and complex diseases of modern society is metabolic syndrome. This syndrome has not been completely understood, and therefore an effective treatment is not available yet. We propose a possible stem cell mechanism involved in the development of metabolic syndrome. This way of thinking lets us consider also other significant pathologies that could have similar [or shared biological pathways], like lipodystrophic syndromes, progeria, and aging. All these clinical situations could be the consequence of a progressive and persistent stem cell exhaustion syndrome (SCES). The main outcome of this SCES would be an irreversible loss of the effective regenerative mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) pools.

In this way, the normal repairing capacities of the organism could become inefficient. Stem cell restoration has already demonstrated therapeutic activities in certain systems. For example, it is known that after a stroke, endogenous stem cells are mobilized from the bone marrow in an attempt to heal the damaged neural tissue. Most interestingly, a recent study demonstrated that stroke patients who exhibit a high level of stem cell mobilization have better functional outcomes as opposed to patients with a lower mobilization. If [MSCs exhaustion syndrome] is true, then a stem cell therapy approach could be feasible. For instance, ex vivo expansion and reinfusion of MSCs from the patient's own or from allogeneic donors, as evidence shows that MSCs are not immunogenic at all, have been already tested in many clinical trials. In the best case scenario, MSCs therapy could retard the onset of irreversible lesions associated with metabolic syndrome or at least partially improve those already present."

ON LONGEVITY INSURANCE Friday, July  1, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/07/on-longevity-insurance-1.php
It is worth watching the prevalence of longevity insurance offerings, as this is a measure of the degree to which the actuarial community and insurance industry believes that increases in human life span will happen in the near future, but that they will not be large. For the insurer, longevity insurance is a bet on earlier than anticipated death: "Most people buy life insurance to protect against the risks of dying too soon. Now, there are new products offering the same protection if you live too long. It's known as longevity insurance, and there's clearly a huge market for it: Life expectancies are on the rise, cushy pensions are on the decline, and most people don't have enough savings to carry them through two decades or more of retirement.

This is not lost on insurance companies, which would like you to think about the product as a pension of sorts - albeit one that you have to buy with your own money. But what happens if Merck invents the magic pill and we all live until 105? Continued improvements in medicine that allow people to live longer could create losses on our individual annuity business. but these would be more than offset by higher gains on the life insurance. Still [if] something like that were to happen, 'at some point, capacity might be limited.'" Companies that bet against large increases in longevity are likely to suffer greatly in decades to come - which is unfortunate for the rest of us, because these concerns are large enough to run to the nearest government for a bailout, and thus we all end up paying for collective bad bets.

STEPPING IN THE DIRECTION OF ARTIFICIAL CELLS Thursday, June 30, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/06/stepping-in-the-direction-of-artificial-cells.php
Artificial cells are one possible line of future biotechnology; devices built to resemble the body's building blocks, essentially nanomachines constructed of proteins. Here researchers take a modest step in that direction, by developing "a novel method of disguising nanoparticles as red blood cells, which will enable them to evade the body's immune system and deliver cancer-fighting drugs straight to a tumor. The method involves collecting the membrane from a red blood cell and wrapping it like a powerful camouflaging cloak around a biodegradable polymer nanoparticle stuffed with a cocktail of small molecule drugs. Nanoparticles are less than 100 nanometers in size, about the same size as a virus. This is the first work that combines the natural cell membrane with a synthetic nanoparticle for drug delivery applications.

This nanoparticle platform will have little risk of immune response. Stealth nanoparticles are already used successfully in clinical cancer treatment to deliver chemotherapy drugs. They are coated in a synthetic material such as polyethylene glycol that creates a protection layer to suppress the immune system so that the nanoparticle has time to deliver its payload. Ttoday's stealth nanoparticle drug delivery vehicles can circulate in the body for hours compared to the minutes a nanoparticle might survive without this special coating. But in [this latest] study, nanoparticles coated in the membranes of red blood cells circulated in the bodies of lab mice for nearly two days. One of the next steps is to develop an approach for large-scale manufacturing of these biomimetic nanoparticles for clinical use. Researchers will also add a targeting molecule to the membrane that will enable the particle to seek and bind to cancer cells, and integrate the team's technology for loading drugs into the nanoparticle core so that multiple drugs can be delivered at the same time."

LITHIUM AS TREATMENT FOR PARKINSON'S DISEASE Tuesday, June 28, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/06/lithium-as-treatment-for-parkinsons-disease.php
A number of interesting studies on lithium have turned up in recent years, such as its possible association with longevity in humans. Here researchers are testing it against Parkinson's disease: "A two-year study of the effects of lithium treatment on Parkinson's disease in mice has given researchers at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging hope that the drug may halt brain damage in humans with the degenerative disorder. The research found that lithium, the Food and Drug Administration-approved drug most commonly used to treat bipolar disorder, 'profoundly prevents the aggregation of toxic proteins and cell loss associated with Parkinson's disease' in mice. In the last couple of years, there's been kind of a growing body of data that suggests that lithium could have some neuroprotective effects.

Other diseases lithium treatment may benefit include Alzheimer's, Huntington's and Lou Gehrig's. In addition, recent studies have suggested that the naturally occurring substance may extend life span. The group is now doing preclinical research on dose level and other issues and hopes to raise funds for a clinical trial with humans as soon as possible. Nonetheless, it is too early to draw conclusions, [as] medications that appear to halt Parkinson's in animals don't necessarily work the same way in humans. Lithium's potential for toxicity is also of concern, particularly because Parkinson's patients are often quite fragile, he said. In at least two known cases, toxic levels of the drug have actually caused Parkinson's."

LARGE MULTIVITAMIN STUDY SHOWS NO BENEFIT Monday, June 27, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/06/large-multivitamin-study-shows-no-benefit.php
This paper can be filed alongside those that show no benefit from the use of ingested antioxidants: "Although multivitamin/mineral supplements are commonly used in the United States, the efficacy of these supplements in preventing chronic disease or premature death is unclear. To assess the relation of multivitamin use with mortality and cancer, the authors prospectively examined these associations among 182,099 participants enrolled in the Multiethnic Cohort Study between
1993 and 1996 in Hawaii and California. During an average 11 years of follow-up, 28,851 deaths were identified.

In Cox proportional hazards models controlling for tobacco use and other potential confounders, no associations were found between multivitamin use and mortality from all causes (for users vs. nonusers: hazard ratio = 1.07, 95% confidence interval: 0.96, 1.19 for men; hazard ratio = 0.96, 95% confidence interval: 0.85, 1.09 for women), cardiovascular diseases, or cancer. The findings did not vary across subgroups by ethnicity, age, body mass index, preexisting illness, single vitamin/mineral supplement use, hormone replacement therapy use, and smoking status. There also was no evidence indicating that multivitamin use was associated with risk of cancer, overall or at major sites, such as lung, colorectum, prostate, and breast. In conclusion, there was no clear decrease or increase in mortality from all causes, cardiovascular disease, or cancer and in morbidity from overall or major cancers among multivitamin supplement users."

NOTE: It would be interesting to see what the dosages were of the various vitamins in the complex.

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