Aging Gracefully without Chronic Human Diseases
Time Magazine and National Geographic both recently ran cover stories with a baby on the cover. The tagline reads: This baby could live to be 142 years old. So the question that immediately comes to mind is: Is this possible and can everyone age gracefully without chronic human diseases? And can we do it with today’s technology ?
To explore this question we first need to compare the mortality in 1900 versus today. In 1900, half of the deaths were caused by pneumonia, influenza, tuberculosis, gastrointestinal infections. These diseases were cured largely with antibiotics and antivirals after world war two. Cancer, diabetes, coronary heart disease, and Alzheimer’s were present but not near the rates we see today. Now, the top causes of death today, according to US statistics are heart disease, lung cancer, lung disease (asthma) , stroke, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and hypertension. An interesting question to ask would be: Do all these new, twenty first century diseases all have something in common, just like the top causes of death in 1900 where from bacterial or viral sources? A review of the medical literature shows two primary causes. In turns out that most chronic human diseases are 1) triggered by excess free radicals or oxidative stress and 2) are the result of a lack of essential minerals and trace minerals and cofactors in our diets.
Oxidative Stress
Free radicals or oxidative stress is the result of our cells metabolizing or breathing oxygen. Free radical are the “waste” products of life, and they are very destructive to cell membranes, proteins and DNA. Our body has a natural protective system-antioxidant enzymes that neutralize excess free radicals. If this delicate balance is disrupted, this then leads to an inflammation response in the body and eventually, chronic diseases could ensue. As we age, our natural antioxidant protective systems decline and we are told to supplement with natural botanical antioxidants, such as blueberries , green tea or cinnamon or antioxidant supplements such as Vitamin E or coenzyme Q10. But then we run into the “antioxidant paradox”. All these food antioxidants work great as antioxidants in a test tube in the lab, but in human clinical trials, the beneficial effects are either inconclusive or negative. This is because saliva and gut bacteria metabolise many these botanical antioxidants, before they have a chance to act beneficially.
Ukrainian scientists discovered the world’s highest antioxidant called Carbon 60 hydrated fullerenes, which is stable and inert and not metabolised by bacteria. Carbon 60, a natural product, was discovered in 1985 and a Nobel prize in Chemistry was awarded for this discovery in 1996. Scientists and doctors were calling it the panacea or silver bullet in medicine, but because it’s not naturally water soluble, just like diamonds, charcoal or activated charcoal, this frustrated scientists. Ukrainian scientist in Kharkiv the first to discovered how to dissolve Carbon 60 in water in 1994. After 20 years of preclinical, safety and clinical studies, Carbon 60 hydrated fullerenes were approved as a “dietary supplement” by the Ukrainian Ministry of Health and has been on the Ukrainian market since 2010. There is now a US patent pending. Scientists are now claiming that most chronic human diseases are triggered by excess free radicals. Just do a search on PUBMED with the key words “oxidative stress” and your own disease and you will find a link. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed ). Reduce excess free radicals and reduce your disease symptoms. A study at the University of Paris in 2010 showed that rats feed a diet supplemented with Carbon 60 in olive oil, increased the lifespan of rats by 90% from an average of 25-30 months to over 55 months.
Essential minerals and trace minerals.
The National Post ran a story on May 1- “Obese Canadians should be granted legal protection from discrimination, professor says.” The obesity debate is totally missing the point. Most Doctors are ignoring their own medical research. The cause of the 400% increase in obesity in last 3 decades in Canada and sharp rise in most other chronic human diseases since the 1930’ is due to a chronic lack of essential minerals and trace minerals in our diet (plants, fruits and vegetables) that are needed as co-factors in the body for our biochemical pathways to work efficiently.
The soil minerals concentrations have been dropping worldwide for the last 100 years, so less and less minerals are absorbed in fruits, vegetables and other plants. This is due primarily to the fact that we no longer cook and heat our homes with wood and throw away the ashes (95% minerals) back into the garden to replenish the soil with the 60 essential and trace minerals that our bodies need. Fertilizer only has 3 minerals. Even the nutritional supplements commonly found in most health food stores don't carry the full complement of 90 essential nutrients, which should include 60 essential minerals, 15 essential vitamins, 12 essential amino acids and 3 fatty acids and the right doses of each and the correct easily absorbable mineral salts.
How do we know that we need 90 essential nutrients? Just talk to any veterinarian. Vets have cured over 600 chronic human diseases in farm animals and in zoo animals by supplementing their food with nutritional pellets. When was the last time you saw a cow with arthritis and a pig with Alzheimer’s? Vets have to cure an animal after the first time otherwise beef would cost over $500 a pound or eggs $50 a dozen. Why? Because animals don’t have health insurance. Doctors are quite content to treat your disease symptoms for the rest of your life, billing health insurance and not curing your disease after a few visits. Human clinical studies in the past 40 years have shown that most chronic human diseases are also caused by essential mineral deficiencies and can be controlled with the proper essential and trace minerals. Diabetes has been controlled with the right amount of chromium and vanadium and other essential cofactors. Arthritis is a lack of proper calcium absorption and cofactors such as Vitamin D and magnesium. Greying hair is a copper deficiency in the diet.
So can we live to be 100 or over without chronic human diseases? Yes by reducing excess oxidative stress or free radicals in our body and ensuring that we get the right daily balance of 90 essential nutrients including 60 minerals and trace minerals.
If you would like more information on the above or a copy of my presentation on Aging Gracefully without Chronic Human Diseases that I gave at Ukrainian Canadian Social Services last week, send me an email [email protected] or call (416) 819-9667 or download it from this link http://bit.ly/1KzZvm8 For Ukrainian listeners, catch my Ukrainian radio interview on Radio KONTAKT archives from Saturday April 25, 2015 http://www.kontaktglobal.com/radio-saturday.html
Walter Derzko is the president of the startup C60 Water North America
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Scientists at USC have developed a new microscopy technology that allows them to view single molecules in living animals at higher-than-ever resolution.
Dubbed "Complementation Activated Light Microscopy" (CALM), the new technology allows imaging resolutions that are an order of magnitude finer than conventional optical microscopy, providing new insights into the behavior of biomolecules at the nanometer scale.
In a paper published on Sept. 18 by Nature Communications, the researchers behind CALM used it to study dystrophin – a key structural protein of muscle cells – in Caenorhabditis elegans worms used to model Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
Duchenne muscular dystrophy is the most severe and most common form of the degenerative disease.
The researchers showed that dystrophin was responsible for regulating tiny molecular fluctuations in calcium channels while muscles are in use. The discovery suggests that a lack of functional dystrophin alters the dynamics of ion channels – helping to cause the defective mechanical responses and the calcium imbalance that impair normal muscle activity in patients with muscular dystrophy.
Ten Times the Precision of Optical Microscopy
CALM works by splitting a green fluorescent protein from a jellyfish into two fragments that fit together like puzzle pieces. One fragment is engineered to be expressed in an animal test subject while the other fragment is injected into the animal's circulatory system.
When they meet, the fragments unite and start emitting fluorescent light that can be detected with incredible accuracy, offering imaging precisions of around 20 nanometers. Conventional optical microscopy of living tissues can only achieve a 200 nanometer resolution at best. For scale, a sheet of paper is 100,000 nanometers thick.
"Now, for the first time, we can explore the basic principles of homeostatic controls and the molecular basis of diseases at the nanometer scale directly in intact animal models," said Fabien Pinaud, assistant professor at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and lead researcher on the project.
Pinaud collaborated with scientists from the University Claude Bernard Lyon in France and the University of Würzburg in Germany.
Building the Tools for Tomorrow's Research
The new technology lies at the heart of the convergence of science and engineering at USC, where researchers from both fields collaborate to create the tools that make scientific and medical breakthroughs possible.
"There are trillions of proteins at work on an infinitely small scale at every moment in an animal's body. The ability to detect individual protein copies in their native tissue environment allows us to reveal their functional organization and their nanoscale molecular behaviors despite this astronomical complexity," Pinaud said.
Next, Pinaud and his colleagues will focus on engineering other colors of split-fluorescent proteins to image the dynamics of individual ion channels at neuromuscular synapses within live worms.
"It so happens that the same calcium channels we studied in muscles also associate with nanometer-sized membrane domains at synapses where they modulate neuronal transmissions in both normal and disease conditions," Pinaud said. Using multi-color CALM, his team and collaborators will probe how these tiny active zones of neurons are assembled and how they influence the function of calcium channels during neuron activation.
This research was funded by USC startup funds and the computational work was supported by the USC Center for High-Performance Computing and Communications.
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