Healthy Life Extension

Miracle Pill Adds 7 Healthy Years to Your Life

posted on January 19, 2010

How much would you pay for this miracle pill that slashes heart disease, reduces your chance of getting cancer, avoids diabetes, cuts your risk of dementia, strengthens your bones and immune system, increases muscle mass and melts fat?

$500 a month? $5,000? Don’t you think it would be worth that… and more? What are seven healthy extra years of life worth to you?

Well here’s exciting news. It’s nowhere close to $500 a month. In fact… it’s almost free.

Okay, okay, in order to get your attention, I did fib a little. It’s not actually a pill. It’s something more natural and so low tech that we tend to ignore it in the search for a quick fix.

Marketers have known for ages that people will pay almost anything for a cure and little or nothing for prevention. However, what if you could not only prevent but also cure much of what ails you? Let’s call it Vitamin E (for Exercise).

Exercise is undeniably good for long term health, far better than any medical technology presently available - but why? Here is an overview of some of what is now known:

Physical activity has long been known to bestow such benefits as helping to maintain a healthy weight and reduce stress, not to mention tightening those abs. Now, a growing body of research is showing that regular exercise - as simple as a brisk 30- to 45-minute walk five times a week - can boost the body's immune system, increasing the circulation of natural killer cells that fight off viruses and bacteria.

No pill or nutritional supplement has the power of near-daily moderate activity in lowering the number of sick days people take. Regular exercise has been shown to combat the ongoing damage done to cells, tissues and organs that underlies many chronic conditions.

Indeed, studies have found exercise can lower blood pressure, reduce bad cholesterol, and cut the incidence of Type 2 diabetes. Exercise-induced changes in the body's immune system may even protect against some forms of cancer. Researchers are also investigating whether exercise can influence aging in the body. In particular, they are looking at whether exercise lengthens telomeres, the strands of DNA at the tips of chromosomes.

http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4539

Exercise is demonstrably good for your long term health - far better than any supplement or medical technology presently available.

Okay… stop reading right here, and let this sink in:

I have repeatedly urged you to take action now. What changes have you actually made in your lifestyle? Any at all? Good! None? Not good. Remember, “Tomorrow never comes”.

Take a moment now to measure the potential cost of your inaction. On the flip side, remember your rewards of action. Your risk? Suffering and death! Your reward? Seven extra years could put you on the path to indefinite youth, happiness and prosperity!               
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LATEST HEALTHY LIFE EXTENSION HEADLINES

LEARNING THE WRONG LESSON (January 15 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4555
There are those who believe, completely and unquestioningly, that progress in medicine cannot occur without omnipresent regulation to suppress fraud. They point to the fraud that occurs anyway under heavily regulated development as the reason why. They believe that the vast overkill, perverse incentives, and needless hoop-jumping of FDA trials are needed to vet every last new therapy. But there will always be fraud, what works and what doesn't work will be established even without formal trials, and the most rapid progress in commercializing modern medicine, such as stem cell therapies, occurs in the least regulated of the wealthy regions of the world. This Economist article is an excellent example of the way in which people learn the wrong lesson from the state of the world, and accept without question what they are told by those politicians, bureaucrats, and businesspeople who have a vested short-term interest in the continuation of the US-styled system of medical regulation, no matter how harmful it is to progress.

CONTEMPLATING OBESITY (January 15 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4554
Here is a JAMA article on the epidemiological consequences of increased obesity, written from a conservative point of view - i.e. the author believes that advancing medical technology will not greatly increase life span in the foreseeable future. "In 1900, [infectious disease] was a major concern, and the most common causes of death in the United States and in many parts of the world at the time were pneumonia and tuberculosis. Today, most individuals die of cardiovascular disease or cancer. This dramatic shift in the illnesses that cause the majority of death and disability has been divided into 4 stages known as the epidemiologic transition. In the last 2 decades, however, a fifth stage, marked by an alarming increase in overweight and obesity and continued decreases in physical activity, has emerged. By the mid 1960s, the United States had entered the fourth stage of delayed degenerative diseases. Cardiovascular disease mortality declined, related to preventive strategies such as smoking cessation programs and effective blood pressure control, acute coronary care units, and technological advances that included coronary artery bypass surgery. Despite the many advances in preventive medicine and treatment that reduced cardiovascular disease, the new stage of the epidemiologic transition, the age of obesity and inactivity, emerged to threaten the progress made in postponing illness and death to later in adult life spans. The steady gains made in both quality of life and longevity by addressing risk factors such as smoking, hypertension, and dyslipidemia are threatened by the obesity epidemic."

EXERCISE PRESERVES TELOMERE LENGTH (January 14 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4553
Researchers have shown that exercise boosts telomerase and slows the erosion of telomeres with age. Here is another small study that shows the telomere length association: "Telomere length (TL), a measure of replicative senescence, decreases with aging, but the factors involved are incompletely understood. To determine if age-associated reductions in TL are related to habitual endurance exercise and maximal aerobic exercise capacity (maximal oxygen consumption, VO(2)max), we studied groups of young (18 - 32 years) and older (55 - 72 years) sedentary and young and older endurance exercise-trained healthy adults. Leukocyte TL (LTL) was shorter in the older vs. young sedentary adults. LTL of the older endurance-trained adults was approximately [900 base pairs] greater than their sedentary peers and was not significantly different from young exercise-trained adults. LTL was positively related to VO(2)max due to a significant association in older adults. Stepwise multiple regression analysis revealed that VO(2)max independently explained approximately 60% of the variance in LTL. Our results indicate that LTL is preserved in healthy older adults who perform vigorous aerobic exercise and is positively related to maximal aerobic exercise capacity. This may represent a novel molecular mechanism underlying the 'anti-aging' effects of maintaining high aerobic fitness." Equally, it is still plausible that telomere length is only a marker for other processes.

CHALLENGING THE RESVERATROL DATA (January 13 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4551
Via In the Pipeline, I see that research groups are suggesting that some of the data for resveratrol (and other possible calorie restriction mimetics developed by Sirtris) is invalid, and previously reported beneficial effects on mice cannot be replicated: "Last fall, a group at Amgen published a study suggesting that some of the SIRT1/resveratrol connections might be due to an experimental artifact caused by a particular fluorescent peptide. Now a group at Pfizer has piled on in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. They're looking over resveratrol and a series of sirtuin activators described by the Sirtris group in Nature. And unfortunately, they also find trouble due to fluorogenic peptides. The TAMRA fluorophore on their peptide substrates seems to pervert the assay. While the Sirtris compounds looked like activators initially, switching to the native peptide substrates showed them to be worthless. Further study (calorimetry) showed that the activator compounds bind to a complex of SIRT1 and the fluorescent peptide substrate, but not to SIRT1 itself (or in the presence of native substrate without the fluorogenic group). That's not good." The researchers also failed to replicate beneficial health effects in their studies on mice. "Basically, these folks have thrown down the gauntlet: they claim that the reported Sirtris compounds do not do what they are claimed to do, neither in vitro nor in vivo, and are worthless as model compounds for anything in this area of study."

THE CETP LONGEVITY GENE AND ALZHEIMER'S RISK (January 13 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4550
We should expect gene variants associated with human longevity to also be associated with lowered risk of age-related disease. Here is one example: "In a 2003 study, Dr. Lipton and his colleagues identified the cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) gene variant as a 'longevity gene' in a population of Ashkenazi Jews. The favorable CETP gene variant increases blood levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) - the so-called good cholesterol - and also results in larger-than-average HDL and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) particles. The researchers of the current study hypothesized that the CETP longevity gene might also be associated with less cognitive decline as people grow older. To find out, they examined data from 523 participants from the Einstein Aging Study, an ongoing federally funded project that has followed a racially and ethnically diverse population of elderly Bronx residents for 25 years. At the beginning of the study, the 523 participants - all of them 70 or over - were cognitively healthy, and their blood samples were analyzed to determine which CETP gene variant they carried. They were then followed for an average of four years and tested annually to assess their rates of cognitive decline, the incidence of Alzheimer's disease and other changes. We found that people with two copies of the longevity variant of CETP had slower memory decline and [a] 70 percent reduction in their risk for developing Alzheimer's disease."

EXERCISE VERSUS AGE-RELATIVE COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT (January 12 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4549
Yet another study to show that exercise likely does more to slow age-related mental degeneration than any presently available medical technology: "Moderate physical activity performed in midlife or later appears to be associated with a reduced risk of mild cognitive impairment, whereas a six-month high-intensity aerobic exercise program may improve cognitive function in individuals who already have the condition. A total of 29 participants completed the study. Overall, the patients in the high-intensity aerobic exercise group experienced improved cognitive function compared with those in the control group. These effects were more pronounced in women than in men, despite similar increases in fitness. The sex differences may be related to the metabolic effects of exercise, as changes to the body's use and production of insulin, glucose and the stress hormone cortisol differed in men and women. In another report [a] total of 198 participants (median or midpoint age, 83 years) were determined to have mild cognitive impairment and 1,126 (median age 80) had normal cognition. Those who reported performing moderate exercise - such as brisk walking, aerobics, yoga, strength training or swimming - during midlife or late life were less likely to have mild cognitive impairment. Midlife moderate exercise was associated with 39 percent reduction in the odds of developing the condition, and moderate exercise in late life was associated with a 32 percent reduction. The findings were consistent among men and women."

PROTEIN THERAPY AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO GENE THERAPY (January 11 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4547

From Nanowerk: "Proteins are the most important molecules inside our body. There are thousands of [types of] proteins in a single cell alone and they control our physiological reactions, metabolism, cellular information flow, defense mechanisms - pretty much everything. No wonder then that most human diseases are related to the malfunctioning of particular proteins. In contrast to gene therapy - where a gene is placed inside a cell to either replace a defective gene or to increase the amount of a specific gene in order to produce a higher amount of a desired protein - protein therapy works by directly delivering well-defined and precisely structured proteins into the cell to replace the dysfunctional protein. This approach avoids the difficulties and potential problems of gene therapy and is generally considered the most direct and safe approach for treating disease. The problem with protein therapy, which limits its practical use in medicine, is the mode of delivery. Administration of proteins via oral, intravenous, intra-arterial, or intramuscular routes show low delivery efficiency and often the therapeutic protein is metabolized or cleared before it can enter the target tissue. A team of scientists at UCLA has now demonstrated a general, effective, low-toxicity intracellular protein delivery system based on single-protein nanocapsules. This work opens a new direction not only for protein therapy but also for cellular imaging, tumor tracking, cosmetics and many other applications."

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