Longevity News

The Best "Cure All" on the Planet

posted on October 12, 2010

By now, you must know “You are what you think about.” And if you’ve been listening to me long enough, you know your thoughts affect every one of your trillions of cells. Your cells communicate with one another, and what you eat, drink and breathe affects all your cells as well.

You are basically the sum total of your cells. Your cells’ lives are controlled by the physical and energetic environment, and not by their genes. You can even modify your genes without changing their basic blueprint by modifying their environment through changes in your diet, emotions, toxins, stress. And guess what? Those modifications can be passed on to your future generations.

Understanding how your cells respond to your thoughts and perceptions illuminates your path to personal empowerment. This largely determines how you look and feel and how long you live. In fact, only about 5 percent of cancer and cardiovascular patients can attribute their disease to heredity.

In his best-selling book, Biology of Belief, Dr. Bruce H. Lipton describes how biology’s central dogma, that your genes control your life, contains one fatal flaw – genes cannot turn themselves on or off.

When cells are ailing, look first to the cell’s environment for the cause, not to the cell itself. In a healthy environment, cells thrive. They falter in sub-optimal environments. The flow of information in biology starts with an environmental signal, then goes to a regulatory protein which goes to your DNA, RNA, and the end result, a protein.

Dr. Lipton points out the true brain that controls cellular life is the cell’s membrane. The real secret of life does not lie in the famed double helix. It lies in understanding the elegantly simple biological mechanisms of the membrane – the mechanisms by which your body translates environmental signals, including your thoughts, into behavior.

Think of the cell membrane as the equivalent of a silicon chip. Compare the workings of your cells to your personal computer. They are both programmable, and the programmer lies outside the cells. You are the programmer, whether you do it consciously or unconsciously. The cell nucleus is simply a memory disk, a hard drive containing the DNA programs that encode the production of proteins, which in turn govern your biochemistry. Data is entered into the cell via the cell’s receptors, which represent the cell’s “keyboard.” Receptors trigger the membrane’s effector proteins which act as the cell’s Central Processing Unit (CPU). The CPU’s effector proteins convert environmental information into the behavioral language of biology. You have the ability to edit the data you enter into your biocomputers just as surely as I can choose these words I type.

And you do it with the world’s best “cure all”, your mind.

The seemingly separate subdivisions of the mind, the conscious and subconscious, are interdependent. The conscious mind is the creative one that can conjure up positive thoughts. In contrast, the subconscious mind is a repository of stimulus-response tapes derived from instincts and learned experiences. The actions of your subconscious mind are reflexive in nature and are not governed by reason or thinking. It is strictly habitual; it will play the same behavioral responses to life’s signals over and over again. How many times have you found yourself going ballistic over something trivial like another driver cutting you off in traffic? That’s an example of a simple stimulus-response of a behavior program stored in your subconscious.

Endowed with the ability to be self-reflective, the self-conscious mind is extremely powerful. It can observe any programmed behavior you are engaged in, evaluate your behavior, and consciously decide to change your program.

Programmed behavior can come from almost anywhere. Once you accept the perceptions of others as “truths”, their perceptions become hardwired into your own brain. What if they are wrong? What if your teachers give you destructive programming? What if the news reports you get are slanted? Your subconscious works only in the “now”. Programmed misperceptions in your subconscious mind are not monitored and will habitually engage you in destructive and limiting behaviors. You can actively choose how to respond to most environmental signals and to control your beliefs. You can even choose to not respond at all. Your conscious mind’s capacity to override your subconscious mind’s preprogrammed behaviors is the foundation of free will.

Dr. Lipton concludes that beliefs control biology.

The placebo effect is actually a perception or a belief effect. The history of medicine is largely the history of the placebo effect. Arthritic knees are one example. In one study, the placebo effect (fake surgery) improved patients just as much as the other two groups who received surgery. In more than half the clinical trials for the six leading antidepressants, the drugs did not outperform sugar pills. There are thousands of other examples.

When the mind, through positive suggestion improves health, it is referred to as this placebo effect. Conversely, when the same mind is engaged in negative suggestions that can damage health, the negative effects are referred to as the nocebo effect. Doctors’ words and actions can trigger both. You can live or die because you believe you will live or die, and doctors can be responsible for their patients’ recovery or even their dying by the messages they communicate to them.

The messages you receive, the messages that reach your cells are the key. You are the gate keeper. To thrive, you need to actively seek a joyful, loving and fulfilling life that stimulates growth. Examine how your fears and the ensuing protection behaviors impact your life. Are any fears stunting your growth? Where did they come from? Are they necessary? Real? Are they contributing to a full life, or are they shortening it?

You can change long-standing limiting beliefs in a matte of minutes. Read Biology of Belief to learn more about the cure all we were born with but too often use in reverse.

Long Life,
David Kekich
____________________________

LATEST HEALTHY LIFE EXTENSION HEADLINES

LEVEL OF US MEDICAL RESEARCH FUNDING IN 2009 (October 08 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4935
Via FuturePundit, the estimates for recent research funding: "The U.S. invested $139 billion last year in health research from all public and private sources, according to Research!America's latest annual estimate.
That amount represents only 5.6% of the $2.47 trillion overall U.S. health spending in 2009 [which] varies no more than 0.2% from 2005 levels. We are all growing old. We are all aging and our parts are breaking down and wearing out. A portion of those billions of dollars flows toward science technologies that will eventually put an end to aging. Human bodies will become as repairable as cars. Replacement organs, cell therapies, gene therapies, and even nanobots will, at some point in the 21st century, halt and reverse the process of aging. Will you still be alive when that day is reached?" As has always been the case, funding for research is a tiny percentage of the flows of money in our culture. Funding for aging research is a tiny fraction of the figures given above, and funding for engineered longevity is in turn a tiny fraction of aging research. To fully realize the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence in mice in the laboratory would probably cost in the vicinity of $1-2 billion over a decade or two. Food for thought.

A POPULAR SCIENCE ARTICLE ON TISSUE ENGINEERING (October 08 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4934
From the Australian: "Generating new body organs in the lab is the stuff of Hollywood fantasy. But judging by the latest experimental findings, science fiction may soon be science fact. Already, a bio-printer is cranking out three-dimensional tissues and Australian researchers are hard at work growing spare parts, with designer tissues proving their stuff in animal - and even human - trials. In animal experiments, [researchers have] made breast, fat, muscle and even pancreatic tissue that secretes insulin. They've also created tissue of a specialized immune system organ, the thymus, opening the way for multiple applications in immunology. That's because the thymus schools T-cells that help the immune system identify and fight infections and foreign cells. Using mice bred with no immune system, [researchers] found that after the mice received newly grown tissue they developed effective immune responses. The institute is engaged in a small number of human clinical trials with fat and breast tissue. The goal is to establish whether tissue can be created and used to replace tissue removed due to cancer. The trials have about six months to run. While creating living tissue is important, the larger aim is creation of functioning human organs."

A SUMMARY OF THE CALERIE STUDY (October 07 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4932
CALERIE is the largest present study of calorie restriction in humans: "In a robust and consistent manner, sustained caloric restriction (CR) has been shown to retard the aging process in a variety of animal species. Nonhuman primate studies suggest that CR may have similar effects in longer-lived species. The CALERIE (Comprehensive Assessment of the Long-term Effects of Reducing Intake of Energy) research program is the first systematic investigation of CR in nonobese human beings. In the phase 2 study, it is hypothesized that 2 years of sustained CR, involving a 25% reduction of ad libitum energy intake, results in beneficial effects similar to those observed in animal studies. The study is a multicenter, parallel-group, randomized controlled trial. A sample of 225 participants [is] being enrolled with 2:1 allocation to CR. An intensive dietary and behavioral intervention was developed to achieve 25% CR and sustain it over the 2 years. Adherence is monitored using a doubly labeled water technique. Primary outcomes are resting metabolic rate and core temperature, and are assessed at baseline and at 6-month intervals. Secondary outcomes address oxyradical formation, cardiovascular risk markers, insulin sensitivity and secretion, immune function, neuroendocrine function, quality of life and cognitive function. The results will provide insight into the detrimental changes associated with the human aging process and how CR mitigates these effects."

BRANCHED-CHAIN AMINO ACIDS AND MOUSE LIFE SPAN (October 06 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4931
Inevitably, researchers who focus on slowing aging through metabolic manipulation will uncover ingested compounds that alter metabolism in beneficial ways, and thus very modestly raise life expectancy. Here is an example in mice: "Recent evidence points to a strong relationship between increased mitochondrial biogenesis and increased survival. Branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) have been shown to extend chronological life span in yeast. However, the role of these amino acids in mitochondrial biogenesis and longevity in mammals is unknown. Here, we show that a BCAA-enriched mixture (BCAAem) increased the average life span of mice. BCAAem supplementation increased mitochondrial biogenesis and sirtuin 1 expression in primary cardiac and skeletal myocytes and in cardiac and skeletal muscle, but not in adipose tissue and liver of middle-aged mice, and this was accompanied by enhanced physical endurance. Moreover, the reactive oxygen species (ROS) defense system genes were upregulated, and ROS production was reduced by BCAAem supplementation. All of the BCAAem-mediated effects were strongly attenuated in [mice engineered to lack] endothelial nitric oxide synthase." Nitric oxide is important to stem cell and blood vessel function; it is interesting that this effect depends upon that component of metabolism.

LIFESTYLE CHOICES MATTER (October 06 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4930
A brief summary of recent research into risk factors for disease and human longevity: "A set of currently known alleles increasing the risk for coronary artery disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes as identified by genome-wide association studies was tested for compatibility with human longevity. Here, we show that nonagenarian siblings from long-lived families and singletons older than 85 [years] of age from the general population carry the same number of disease risk alleles as young controls. Longevity in this study population is not compromised by the cumulative effect of this set of risk alleles for common disease." The way in which you choose to lead your life is a more important determinant - for example, being sedentary and fat raises your risk of suffering the common diseases of aging far more than most known genetic variants. It is true that there are many gene variants associated with exceptional human longevity, but it still seems to be the case that environment and choice trumps small variations in your biology.

MORE ON HISTONES AND CELL AGING (October 04 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4926
As a companion piece to recent work on histones and aging in yeast, these researchers investigate further the connections between cell aging and histones: "as cells count down to senescence and telomeres wear down, their DNA undergoes massive changes in the way it is packaged. These changes likely trigger what we call 'aging'. Prior to this study we knew that telomeres get shorter and shorter as a cell divides and that when they reach a critical length, cells stop dividing or die. Something must translate the local signal at chromosome ends into a huge signal felt throughout the nucleus. But there was a big gap in between. 

[researchers compared] levels of proteins called histones in young cells - cells that had divided 30 times - with 'late middle-aged' cells, which had divided 75 times and were on the downward slide to senescence, which occurs at 85 divisions. Histone proteins bind linear DNA strands and compress them into nuclear complexes, collectively referred to as chromatin. Aging cells simply made less histone protein than do young cells. These proteins are required throughout the genome, and therefore any event that disrupts this production line affects the stability of the entire genome. Comparisons of histone patterns in cells taken from human subjects-a 9- versus a 92-year-old-dramatically mirrored histone trends seen in cell lines. These key experiments suggest that what we observe in cultured cells in a laboratory setting actually occurs and is relevant to aging in a population." This might be thought of as another line of evidence in the debate over the degree to which nuclear DNA damage contributes to aging.

Back to Top