When my mind seeks novelty I generally read to satisfy and experience how my mind is enjoying the content.
Over the last many days, I read a book ‘Lifespan’ authored by a Harvard Medical School scientist Dr. David Sinclair, PhD.
Truth to be told, over the last many years, I’ve become a clear and conscious reader on many things that interest me.
I read deep and well rounded books and research papers especially to understand how our body works, why disease appears, and how to become healthy in the long run.
And I especially enjoy books on health and lifestyle, food and nutrition, scientific progress, social upliftment, value creation, and financial freedom.
“We must celebrate the success of our life by its joy, happiness and fulfillment, not just by how long we live.”
Reading and writing has become my recreational activity beside my professional work and family.
One thing I’m very confident about is that you will not regret your time if you read ‘Lifespan’ by Dr. David Sinclair.
You will understand why we age and how aging is going to be just a disease in the near future and what can be done to stop faster aging.
As we all know, faster aging is the invitation for chronic diseases like cancer and heart diseases way earlier in our front and backyard of our lives.
‘Lifespan’ looks like a hardcore science book in the beginning but I found a lot of foundational background of human cells and human aging with lots of tips and tricks for a long healthy life.
After reading this, I’m convinced that we can live to be 130, maybe even 150 in excellent health.
The truth is we all want to absorb the amazing flavor and beauty of this life every single day.
We want to be active mentally, physically, and spiritually every single day.
We want to be sharp, strong, energetic, and engaged all the time until we remain on this earth.
With emerging technology on longevity combined with a positive mindset, good lifestyle, excellent diet, and quality sleep I strongly believe it’s possible for all of us.
We all can start turning back our age clock today by simple daily habits that influence how we age over time.
There are certain ways which help us to prevent chronic illness, reverse our biological age, and live long and healthy lives.
I don’t support only the long life, I support the joyful, fulfilled, and happy long life.
We must celebrate the success of our life by its joy, happiness and fulfillment, not just by how long we live.
A crumbled, diseased, and disabled old body is painful even for a short period of time.
“Yoga, breathing exercise, and meditation is linked with positive changes in the level of biomarkers of cellular aging like 8-OH2dG, a product of DNA damage.”
The world needs to recover from disease, uncertain death, and the most acute test of early aging in living memory.
We all need to learn from what happened in the past when there was little to no knowledge and what is happening now in our life and must benefit when there is abundant knowledge regarding aging, biology, technology, and longevity research.
So the main question is how do we stop early aging and avoid chronic disease?
The key takeaways from ‘Lifespan’ are here.
- Slowdown telomere deterioration, the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes.
- Maintain proteostasis for a healthy and stable balance of cells.
- Prevent deregulation of nutrient sensing for detection and response of nutrients levels.
- Thwart mitochondrial dysfunction because mitochondria are energy producers.
- Stop senescence because senescent cells stop dividing permanently but remain alive.
- Rejuvenate stem cells which can self-renew and differentiate.
- Decrease chronic inflammation because it invites deep problems.
- Balance the microbiome.
We can not do all of these at one time but we have to take our life one step at a time by building a small but consistent habit to take care of our body.
One key habit to curb faster and early aging is regular aerobic exercise which becomes more important once we pass age 40.
Aerobic conditioning is required to optimize our VO2 max, maximal oxygen consumption.
Aerobic activities are required to get our lymphatic system moving all the time.
Yoga, breathing exercise, and meditation is linked with positive changes in the level of biomarkers of cellular aging, oxidative stress markers, and telomeres.
It is an oxidized derivative of deoxyguanosine, it is one of the major products of DNA oxidation.
The accumulation of it invites early aging and eventually may result in various diseases including neurodegenerative disease and cancer.
To lower our levels of 8-OH2dG, we have to focus on a healthy lifestyle by improving our diet, reducing stress, avoiding toxins, and exercising regularly.
To curb faster aging and bring happiness and longevity, lower the level of 8-OH2dG, develop habits eating specific phytonutrients regularly.
Phytonutrients are plant compounds that can mimic caloric restriction and lead to xenohormesis, activating autophagy.
Remember, caloric restriction is a key to longevity and these phytochemicals also activate longevity pathways.
- Eat red grapes for resveratrol
- Eat garlic for allicin
- Eat peppers for capsaicin
- Eat broccoli for sulforaphane
- Eat turmeric for curcumin
- Eat berries for anthocyanins
- Eat onion and apples for quercetin
- Drink green tea for epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG)
- Eat extra virgin olive oil for oleuropein
- Eat mushrooms for phenolic acids
“Cigarette smoke contains a chemical called benzo(a)pyrene, a known human carcinogen, that binds to guanine in our DNA and helps to break the double strand of DNA to cause mutations.”
To stop faster and early aging, we must need certain key fundamental supplements like vitamin, NMN, fisetin, and quercetin in our body.
Many trillions of chemical reactions happen in our body every second.
Each one of these reactions needs another chemical or enzyme to complete the reaction.
And again, each one of these enzymes needs another chemical like catalyst or coenzyme to complete the reaction cycle.
Vitamins and many minerals that we need in our body are in the same category.
This is the reality of our complex metabolic system running in our body.
Among many, one of the key chemicals that our body needs to run our metabolic engine is vitamin D.
Make a habit of taking core supplements like vitamin D3, 2000 to 5000 IU a day.
Elmer McCollum, a biochemist at Johns Hopkins University, discovered vitamin D while conducting experiments on rats.
Rats were fed a diet lacking in certain nutrients and he found that these rats developed rickets, a bone disease.
He identified a factor in cod liver oil that stopped rickets and named it vitamin D.
Remember, if there is severe deficiency of vitamin D, we suffer from rickets, osteoporosis, cancer, depression, muscle weakness, heart disease, and dementia.
Vitamin D is a core supplement for our long healthy life.
Another habit to invite early aging is smoking.
Stop smoking immediately, if you want to prevent aging faster.
Smoking is notoriously bad for all ages.
And, of course, smokers age way faster than non-smokers.
Do you know the relationship between cancer and cigarette smoking?
Cigarette smoke contains a chemical called benzo(a)pyrene, a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon, a known human carcinogen.
This chemical binds to guanine in our DNA and helps to break the double strand of DNA and causes mutations.
“One normal human cell can divide 40 to 60 times until its telomere becomes really short and even after stopping division, they continue releasing tiny proteins called cytokines that cause inflammation.”
Once DNA is damaged, the DNA repair workers work overtime.
Even though our body repair cells try to improve the damage process, the epigenetic and metabolic changes that follow will invite cancer cells to flourish.
This is called geroncogenesis which is nothing but decline in cellular health with aging which drives the development of cancer.
The change in genetic and epigenetic condition by regular exposure of cigarette smoke exponentially increases the chance of developing cancer, especially lung cancer.
If you smoke, quitting is the best option to attain a healthy longer life.
Normally, smoking increases the risk of getting cancer five times more if you are younger than 50 years old.
But, if you are more than 50 years old and smoke then your chance of getting cancer is one hundred times more.
If you are more than 70 years old and smoke then your chance of getting cancer is one thousand times more.
This is the effect of toxic chemicals in the aged body.
To prevent faster aging we have to stop senescence in our body.
Once we accumulate a lot of senescent cells, it indicates we are aged with gray hair, flabby muscles, and a lot of wrinkles in our face.
Senescent cells mean they permanently stopped reproduction.
Remember, one human cell can divide 40 to 60 times until its telomere becomes really short.
Even though they stop dividing, they continue releasing tiny proteins called cytokines that cause
inflammation.
Cytokines also cause surrounding cells to become zombie cells that create tumors and spread around.
The problem is, as we age, zombie cells become a part of chronic inflammation.
The fact is that zombie cells are produced by telomere shortening, DNA damage, and epigenetic changes.
Remember, quercetin, a phytochemical found in capes, kale, and red onion, acts as senolytics, a zombie cell killer.
If you lay end to end all the DNA from your body, it would stretch twice the diameter of the solar system.
Even if some DNAs are damaged or dead, we still live but we invite a lot of health problems.
Actually a lot.
“Exercise is one of the most powerful hormetic processes for health creation and life extension because it lowers energy in our muscles and organs, AMPK is activated which improves insulin sensitivity.”
Dr. David Sinclair, author of ‘Lifespan’ and a scientist in Harvard Medical School says “DNA stores information digitally but epigenomes store it in analog format.
Our information is digital but the reader that moves around is analog.”
Dr. Sinclair further adds “Aging is nothing but the accumulation of scratches on the disc so the information can no longer be read. With successive cell divisions and overreaction to DNA damage, the signal becomes increasingly noisy, and when we become old, a lot of original information, epigenetic information is lost.”
There are some drugs and supplements that help us to stop early aging or help to reset our cellular programming.
My mother is diabetic, so I’m very familiar with metformin, and she takes metformin regularly.
After reading ‘Lifespan’ I realized that metformin activates AMPK and makes more NAD and turns on sirtuins and other defenses against aging.
Metformin slows down the loss of epigenetic information and keeps metabolism in balance.
It helps to keep all our vital organs younger and healthier.
There are some main longevity pathways in our body: insulin-signaling, mTOR, AMPK, and sirtuins.
If you want to live longer then these pathways should be activated in some ways.
This can be done in many ways like by adopting low sugar and starch, low calorie or low amino acid diets, exercise, fasting, and many phytochemicals therapy such as resveratrol, fisetin or quercetin.
One more book that I’ve read which is very helpful about longevity and healthy life is Dr. Mark Hyman’s ‘Young Forever’.
You will not regret it but thank me after reading it.
Dr. Hyman says “Calorie restriction activates autophagy and DNA repair.
It reverses insulin resistance, lowers inflammation, optimizes mitochondrial energy production, activates antioxidant systems, and boosts stem cell production.”
The key to being healthy and living longer is by getting moving and lifting.
Exercise is one of the most powerful hormetic processes for health creation and life extension.
When exercise lowers energy in our muscles and organs, AMPK is activated which improves insulin sensitivity.
Dr. Jorge Plutzky, MD, a cardiologist at Harvard said, “if you could find a group of centenarians with perfectly clean arteries, they would have one thing in common – they would be insulin sensitive.”
In 1800, one person would eat 10 pounds of sugar in a year.
Today, we eat 152 pounds in a year.
Excess sugar is the single most reason for aging, disease, and death.
AMPK activation and insulin sensitivity is key to inhibit mTOR, resulting in autophagy and cellular clean up.
Exercise also activates sirtuin pathway, a longevity pathway, to induce DNA repair and inflammation reduction.
The overall result of exercise is, we become healthier, happier, disease resistant, and longer lived.
For the insulin-signaling pathway for longevity, we must balance our blood sugar and keep our insulin levels low to make our cells insulin sensitive by lowering sugar and starch foods.
Rapamycin is one supplement molecule that activates mTOR, another longevity pathway.
Metformin, a common diabetic drug molecule, activates AMPK, another longevity pathway.
Resveratrol and NAD activate sirtuins, the other longevity pathway.
These molecules can mimic the benefits of low calorie diets and exercise and help to extend our lifespan.
Excellent diets and lifestyle are essential for a long healthy life.
Heat therapy like saunas, hot baths improves our health span and addresses the root causes of aging.
A one to four minute cold plunge every day can be a powerful hack to your health, well being and longevity.
NMN, nicotinamide mononucleotide, a longevity booster chemical, is found in foods like avocado, broccoli, and cabbage.
NMN can also protect against kidney damage, neurodegeneration, mitochondrial disease, and Friedreich’s ataxia.
A form of vitamin B3, nicotinamide riboside, NR, is the precursor of NAD, another longevity booster molecule.
NAD is used in more than 500 chemical reactions in our body.
It is essential for energy production and sirtuin activity.
A small amount of NR is found in milk.
In our body, NR is converted into NMN which is further converted into NAD, a major longevity boosting supplement.
Many top tier scientists, including David Sinclair, Eric Verdin, and Coleen Murphy, clearly and openly discuss and take longevity focused supplements like metformin, NAD precursors, rapamycin and resveratrol.
This clearly indicates there is hope and optimism in what science is telling and showing us.
Conclusion
Hopefully, new advancements like Galleri liquid biopsy for cancer screening, DNA methylation biological age testing, and iAge testing, stem cells, exosomes, peptides, natural killer cell therapy, plasmapheresis, and regenerative medicine will be available soon everywhere for ordinary people for long healthy life.
Newer therapies to reverse aging like photobiomodulation, ozone therapy, hyperbaric oxygen therapy HBOT, and hypoxia will be common very soon.
Remember, a lot of body dysfunctions can be reversed through diet, lifestyle, supplements, and medications, and can be tracked over time.
We must be proactive for our body, health, and aging process.
Advancements in medical science, systems medicine, and longevity science will allow us to treat, reverse, and and often cure what we may find in our body.
It’s always better to know than to pretend all is well.
Be conscious and always observe and experience your body, the only engine in this life that runs you.
We cannot live a healthy, happy, fulfilled, and long life if we neglect to nourish our mind, body, and spirit.
Mark Hyman, MD, the author of ‘Young Forever’ says beautifully “The most powerful medicine is at the end of your fork, not at the bottom of your pill bottle. Food is more powerful than anything you will find in your medicine cabinet.”
Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.
Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.”
