Bombshell: Explosive Medical Secrets That Will Redefine Aging (26 page)

It didn’t matter. So the higher your vitamin D, the less likely you are to die of anything except trauma. Another longevity vitamin!

There was another Scandinavian study printed in the
Lancet
, a major medical journal, and the author was Dr. Elina Hyppönen. Researchers asked mothers to give their newborn infants 2,000 units of vitamin D daily. Some did, and some didn’t. They followed these kids for thirty-one years. After all that time, the incidence of type 1
diabetes was 80 percent less among the children of the mothers who gave their children vitamin D.

SS:
Why haven’t we heard about this study?

JW:
Because you can’t patent vitamin D! Nobody can make crazy money on it, so no one is out there pushing it to the doctors. Vitamin D is beneficial for so many things. For instance, let’s expand on diabetes; type 1 diabetes is known to be an autoimmune disease. In the United Kingdom, scientists published an article saying they found the very part of the DNA that, when there isn’t enough vitamin D, allows multiple sclerosis to happen … yet
all
autoimmune diseases are rare among people raised in the tropics: lupus, Graves’ disease, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, vitiligo, pernicious anemia, Addison’s disease—there are more … a very long list of these diseases that are just not present nearly as much in the tropics. So, clearly, vitamin D prevents autoimmune diseases to a large degree. Also Dr. Michael Holick and others have told us that sufficient vitamin D helps to prevent infection as well as any vaccination does.

When vitamin D is combined with vitamin A, it has been proven in clinical trials to prevent childhood mortality from infectious disease. If we all took enough vitamin D with vitamin A, we’d do better than getting flu shots and vaccinations of all sorts. Vitamin D also cuts the risk of prostate cancer, breast cancer, and colon cancer by a significant margin.

SS:
What else do we need to take as protection from the diseases and conditions of today?

JW:
For sure, minerals, fish oil, vitamin E, resveratrol, and coenzyme Q
₁₀
if we’re over forty, and for sure if we’re past fifty. Depending on the individual, there are always others.

SS:
I grow my own organic food and it thrills me. I know it’s not possible for everyone, but I try to urge my readers to use community farms, window boxes, planters to grow food, even if it’s just in the warm months.

JW:
There is no substitute for fresh organic food. If you pick a fresh leaf and eat it immediately, you get all the folate that is in that leaf. But if you take that same leaf, put it in your refrigerator and leave it for a day, 50 percent of the folate is gone. It breaks down with heat, with cold, with light, or just by sitting there. When shipping food around the country from one coast to another, the folate is simply gone, and this is why folate is at the top of the list of vitamins we need to supplement. As you know, Suzanne, that’s just so, so important
for women who want to help ensure that their babies don’t have birth defects.

SS:
What about soil demineralization?

JW:
Believe it or not, the only soil tested in the United States west of the Mississippi River—by the USDA in the 1960s or 1970s—that had adequate zinc was in Nevada, but hardly any crops are raised in Nevada. So zinc is an important supplement. Nonorganic farming takes the minerals out of the soil and replaces these vital elements with nitrogen, potassium, and perhaps phosphorus, and if we’re lucky a very little bit of trace elements. But still it’s not going to get into the plants without some of the organic material. So with soil demineralization, we lose essential nutrients. I said “essential,” and there are many: B vitamins and vitamin E are only two of over sixty essential-to-human-life nutrients.

SS:
Then of course we need essential fatty acids or fish oil.

JW:
Yes, but how many of us eat very much fish? And any fish larger than a salmon is likely to carry more mercury than we want. So supplementing with good-quality mercury-free fish oil once or twice daily is essential.

SS:
How about farmed fish?

JW:
Well, those are not so good for us at all due to antibiotics and feeding these fish corn, which has never, ever been part of a fish’s natural diet and helps cause infections in the fish.

SS:
In essence, our food has been hijacked?

JW:
Sadly, yes. For as long as there have been cattle and sheep—hundreds of thousands of years—they ate grass, weeds, growing plants. But around 1870, people decided it would be much more efficient to raise these animals in stockyards and fatten them up on corn, which was never part of their natural diets. It also made the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids in the animals go way up. If we eat corn- and grain-fed animals, then we also eat way more omega-6 fatty acids. Too many omega-6s are not good for our health. Omega-6 fatty acids are proinflammatory, and the anti-inflammatory omega-3 fatty acids in corn- and grain-fed animals are much lower.

SS:
Also, this corn is most likely genetically modified, which in my opinion is “valueless” food. How did this happen?

JW:
We weren’t paying attention, and labeling of foods as genetically modified is deliberately not required, so we can’t know without a lot of research which foods being sold are genetically modified.

SS:
Imagine … Are you upbeat for the possibilities of aging well?

JW:
In spite of interference by the government, which is currently trying to introduce “approval” of all new natural substances put into supplements after 1994, and that includes a very large proportion of all supplements (which would be a disaster), there are enough people out there researching natural molecules and what we can do with them. When organic food gets into Walmart, which it has, that is a very good sign. It means a very large number of us are beginning to understand the value of nutrition and the concept of “you are what you eat.” This to me is very hopeful. Antiaging medicine is finding its voice. Your books, Suzanne, help tremendously. And more and more people are finding that aging well can be a positive, if you adopt a few new changes.

SS:
It’s that concept of turning the ocean liner around … takes a long time, but it is doable. Thank you, Jonathan. So much valuable information, and only so many pages.

Telomeres
and
telomerase—
these are two words that will change the way you age!

So it’s only fitting that they are the next Bombshell I’ll introduce you to. There is a new supplement that may turn the medical world on its ear. It works by lengthening your telomeres, which appear to be the key to the fountain of youth. And best of all, the supplement that does this work is all natural.

Throughout history, man has been searching for the secret to immortality and now, spectacularly, scientists have unraveled the mystery specifically pinpointing the premier
cause
of aging! This is science at its best and it earned researchers Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Harvard geneticist Jack Szostak the Nobel Prize for developing an enzyme that can actually
reverse
aging. They called the enzyme “the little engine that could.” That enzyme, called
telomerase
,
determines a cell’s ability to regrow or lengthen
telomeres
, which are the essence of life. Simply put, aging happens and accelerates with the loss of telomeres.

What exactly is a telomere? Here’s the textbook definition:

Huh?

In layspeak, telomeres are the tails on the ends of our chromosomes. Each cell in our body has approximately fifty replications. Every time a cell replicates itself, the “tail” (telomere) gets shorter. By the time the cell has replicated fifty or so times, the tail is nonexistent and then the cell dies. We have over fifty trillion cells, and the process of dying cells is called
senescence
. Senescent cells promote the progression of age-related diseases, including cancers. Senescent cells in our skin make us look withered. In our immune system, they make us susceptible to the diseases of aging such as heart disease, heart failure, diabetes, and overall fragility; and even if we are lucky enough to avoid these conditions, eventually so many of our cells will be in a state of senescence the body as a whole will no longer be able to sustain itself. When that happens, we die of “old age.”

The good news is that science, thanks to the Nobel Prize winners mentioned above, has found a way to reverse senescence. Around the mid-1970s, scientists were in general agreement that both ends of every chromosome contain relatively long strands of “junk” DNA called telomeres, and the primary function of these telomeres appeared to be to protect the DNA. So when chromosomes divide and multiply, instead of losing the DNA that matters, they lose only some of the telomere’s DNA. With every replication of our DNA, part of the telomere sequence is chopped off. This is how nature protects the DNA in a chromosome. When cells divide and multiply, it is very important that the DNA in the chromosomes remains intact; otherwise, genetic defects can occur, some not so serious and others very serious (like causing cells to become cancerous).

To understand the importance of telomeres, let’s look at those with the disease called
progeria
. You may be aware of children who are born “old.” Those with this disease have short telomeres. They age prematurely and, sadly and shockingly, wither and die in a very short time. Shorter telomeres correlate with age and the state of your health. In a study of 780 patients with stable heart disease, people with the shortest telomeres in their immune cells had twice the risk of death and heart failure after 4.4 years compared to the patients with the longest telomeres.

As telomeres shorten they are like ticking genetic clocks in your cells. As you age and telomeres shorten, they cause certain of the body’s systems to shut down. The systems that repair damage and keep your metabolism regulated have a drastic effect on aging once removed from action. Some of the key systems affected by diminishing telomeres are your endocrine system (in charge of releasing hormones, crucial to youth) and your all-important immune system. In addition, once some things are damaged, they can’t be repaired very well, such as certain organs and joints and, of course, damaged cells.