Category — Health research

In the wild wild west of supplements, the land of deer antler spray, lamb placenta and noni juice (yes, really) where we’re bombarded with claims and testimonials and celebrity endorsements, it’s a challenge to figure what is good (or at least promising) for those of us who want to tip the balance toward health and vitality as we age.

It’s a great day when real science supplants hucksterism, and we can learn something credible and useful about an anti-aging supplement,  Such is the most recent news about Omega-3s. This is a supplement I take, my decision based on persuasive research that Omega 3s (an essential fatty acid found in cold water fish like salmon) are powerful anti-inflammatory.  Inflammation is implicated in a host of chronic diseases that fast-forward the aging process.

Now there’s more evidence about the health and anti-aging benefits of omega-3s – this time about the link between this supplement and longer telomeres.

What are telomeres and why do we care if they’re long or short?  Glad you asked. Telomeres are the end-caps on our chromosomes that protect them from wear and tear (and death).  Long telomeres signal biological youth.  Shortened telomeres, not so much.  Or, in science speak: “It is becoming increasingly evident that damage specific to the telomeric ends of chromosomes is one of the most critical events that initiate genome instability leading to accelerated ageing, cognitive decline and neurodegenerative disease.”  Got that?  As I said:  Long telomeres, good.  Short telomeres, bad. (I had mine tested during my counterclockwise journey and wrote about it in the book.)

A new study from Australian researchers – a randomized clinical trail (the gold standard), albeit a small, pilot study — found that omega-3 supplementation was associated with “reduced shortening” of telomeres.  This echoes UC/ SF research that found links between omega-3s and slower cellular ageing in people with coronary disease as well as another study that linked omega-3s to improved cognitive ability. If you’re not taking this supplement, you should consider it.

Almost as interesting as the good news about omega-3s is the mirror-image bad news that emerged from the recent  Australian study.  The people who exhibited the greatest shortening of telomere length (remember, short=bad) were those with the highest intake of omega-6s.  While omega-3s are hard to get in our modern diet, omega-6s are way too easy.  Snack foods, fast foods, cookies, crackers and sweets often contain refined vegetable oils, a major source of omega-6s.  More proof – if we needed any more proof – that the American junk food diet is aging us from the inside out.

(Thanks to Dr. Andrew Elliot, the guy behind my telomere testing, for alerting me to this study.)

We live our lives by the numbers.  By “lives,” I am referring here to our health and wellness (and anti-aging) lives.  By “we,” I mean probably you – and most definitely me.

My quantified life:  5-mile runs, 7-minute work-outs, 20 seconds work/ 10 seconds rest Tabata, 10,000 steps a day, 20 reps, 25 lb. kettlebells, 350-calorie breakfast, 20 g of protein a meal, 1200 mgs of calcium a day.  What’s the number on the scale this week?  What’s my VO2 max, BMR, BMI, hip-to-waist ratio, fat-to-lean ratio? (And I’m not nearly as serious about all this as those FitBit, everything-I-do-is-synched-to-every-device-I-own people.  You know who you are.)

Numbers are meaningful — if they have meaning, and if we understand what they mean, and if we realize their limitations and flaws.

For example: Cholesterol.

For years now we’ve been hearing about how high cholesterol is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease (which puts a person on the fast track to poor health and a shortened lifespan).  First we were told that any number above 220 total cholesterol was bad.  Then the magic number was lowered to 200.  Then we began to hear that this total cholesterol number, whatever it was, was really not that important.  It was the ratio of “bad” cholesterol (LDL) – which builds up on the walls of arteries to form plaque — to “good” cholesterol (HDL) – which helps remove “bad” cholesterol from the body that was important.  This gave us another set of numbers to focus on: According to the American Heart Association, the goal is to keep cholesterol ratio 5-to-1 or lower. An optimum ratio is 3.5-to-1.

Now medical researchers are becoming increasingly convinced that “good” and “bad” cholesterol numbers, and their ratios, are less meaningful than was previously thought.  It turns out that it is the size of the lipoproteins, both the “good” and the “bad” ones, that may be what play the significant role in heart disease, diabetes and longevity.  Yay! Another number!  Apparently, small particles are better at digging into the walls of blood vessels and creating the conditions for plaque to form.  Larger, “fluffier” particles don’t do this.  It is not often that large and fluffy are good things in the world of health, so let’s take a moment to enjoy that bit of medical news.

As regular readers of this blog know, I never pass up an opportunity to tout the benefits of exercise, so let me pass along this good news from researchers at Duke University Medical Center:  Exercise makes small dense LDL particles (the most harmful kind) “larger and fluffier”… which translates into lowered risk.

The blood test you get as a part of your annual exam (aka the “lipid panel” your doctor orders), measures total cholesterol and gives you those now less-than-meaningful numbers for LDL and HDL (plus the now less-than-meaningful ratio).  It does not count small particles versus large particles within the LDL and HDL. For those numbers, you need to ask your health provider to order either a VAP or an NMR test.  It may be, next week or next year or ten years from now, we discover that these numbers are less than meaningful, and another metric reveals itself to be the magic measurement of heart and artery health.

I expect that will happen.  I also expect that an active, engaged life and a diet rich in whole foods will remain the keys to enhancing vitality and health.

“I’m just getting older.  That’s why I…(fill in the blank)
…am not as flexible as I used to be”
…have put on weight”
…have less energy than I used to have”
…don’t sleep as well”
…am just not as mentally sharp as I used to be”

No. No. No. No.  And a BIG no.

Here’s what I want to shout from the rooftops:  We should not use chronological age as an excuse/ explanation for unwanted physical and mental changes, for the waning of our abilities.  When we experience those changes, the reaction should be:  Okay, so what am I doing or not doing right now that’s causing this to happen?  And, what can I do (or stop doing) to improve this?  Settling for the “I’m just getting older” explanation is the quickest path to…getting older.

I was reminded of this in a big way last week when Nature, one of the most prestigious scientific journals on the planet, published a study it titled “Game Changer.”  And it is.  This study forces us to re-examine our assumptions about the aging brain, about the waning of cognitive ability, about the “it’s just a part of getting older” mantra.

University of California, San Francisco researchers had older people play a video game that involved swerving around cars while simultaneously picking out road signs.  (Not my idea of a good time, but read on…) Playing the game improved the short-term memory and long-term focus of older adults – and not just while they played the game… and not just specific to the skills of the game.  They had sharper skills (with no additional training) six months after they played the game, and these vastly improved memory and attention skills were evident in other, unrelated tests.

Some people as old as 80 began to show neurological patterns of people in their 20s.

Yes, you read that right.

An MIT neuroscientist not affiliated with the research called the study “a very big deal,” an exclamation that, in the staid and cautious world of science is akin to standing on your head and spitting wooden nickels.  This is ground-breaking.  This really is a Game Changer.  If you can take older people who are not functioning well and make them cognitively younger through training that means their older brains are perfectly capable of functioning younger.  It means “I’m just getting older that’s why I’m not so sharp any more” is invalid.  Maybe you’re not so sharp any more because you don’t challenge yourself, because you don’t provide your brain with stimulating and demanding tasks, because you no longer work up a mental sweat.

One of the main early findings of the study reinforced what we should ALL know by now (but continue to act as if we didn’t):  Multi-tasking harms performance. People in their 20s experienced a 26 percent drop in performance when they were asked to try to drive and identify signs at the same time (rather than just identify the signs without driving). For people in their 60s to 80s, the performance drop was 64 percent.

But after the older adults trained at the game, they became more proficient than untrained people in their 20s.  “We made the activity in older adults’ prefrontal cortex look like the activity in younger adults’ prefrontal cortex,” one of the UCSF researchers told the New York Times.

FYI, on the hope/hype front:  Most commercial so-called brain games do not work as advertised.  Research like this study shows that scientists can – and should — develop the games and objectively test their effectiveness. And we should stop making excuses and start taking action.

Most people, when deciding on what immune-boosting, inflammation-fighting, vitality-enhancing “anti-aging” supplements to take, don’t do what I just spent the last year doing. They don’t attend medical conferences or decode scores of research articles in peer-reviewed journals. They don’t fly around the country interviewing scientists. They don’t take college-level nutrition classes or sit through lectures by internationally acclaimed herbalists.

I did all this because I was researching and writing a book. I didn’t do any of this when (in my pre-book life) I was deciding what supplements I should take.

Most people (like me pre-book) hear about the newest, best, most powerful something from a friend, or an upbeat tidbit in a health and fitness mag or (‘fess up) in a 3 am infomercial. They Google this newest, best, most powerful something…and thus enter the over-hyped, underregulated land of marketeers who have positioned themselves to cash in on our aging angst. Here you read all about the “synergistic vitality products” and “novel formations of anti-aging essentials” that include a dazzling array of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, seeds, berries, flowers, fruits, herbs, mushrooms – not to mention Spanish moss and an extract from “young, clean Scotch pine cones harvested from Wisconsin forests.”

These products all promise vitality and robust health. They promise to turn back the clock. Some of the ingredients in the products have good science behind them. Some have made cages full of rats very happy. Some have proven their worth in Petri dishes. Some are wishful thinking. You would not know the difference based on the claims.

There is an alternate universe that exists along side the internet. (I call it reality.) It is where credible, careful, conscientious researchers are hard at work delving into the mysteries and complexities of how we age and how we might exert some control over that process. Why not use that research to make decisions about supplements rather than falling for – like I used to fall for – those enticing, too good to be true internet claims.

A site I use to educate myself about this wild wild west of supplements, to get links to the latest research and check the latest claims is the Linus Pauling Micronutrient Information Center. It is a no-nonsense compendium, written in understandable language that, like the man after whom it was named, is not afraid to scout the frontier while hewing to the best in scientific inquiry.

Many over-hyped, under-studied supplements are just useless and a waste of money. Occasionally one will be dangerous and a waste of money. Some might work and are worth a try. And some really do work. It is a caveat emptor world out there. And we are the emptors. Time to get smart about it.

Just how many miracle pills can there be?  Are there really dozens of astonishing, astounding, amazing, age-reversing, disease-defying, energy-boosting, mind-sharpening, skin softening, muscle-building pills and potions?  Are health and vitality just a capsule away?

Uh, no.

But you’d certainly think so cruising the internet or flipping through the pages of health and fitness magazines.  (Or watching infomercials …which, of course, none of us admit doing. I, however, can admit this because it was all in the name of research.)

Tru-Pure Green (with 45 percent chlorogenic acid…whatever that might be) is “a miracle pill in a bottle.”  Protandim ( a secret mix of phytochemicals) turns back the clock.  TA-65 (made from Chinese herbs) is the secret to cellular youth.  No, wait: carnosine is the fountain of youth.  And don’t forget resveratrol.  You’ve heard about the miraculous power of this pill (derived from red wine) to rejuvenate you head to foot.

It’s not just internet hucksters who are promoting these “get young quick” approaches.  The way mainstream media, even – gasp – the New York Times, reports on scientific findings also fans the flames.  A study showing the possibility of the potential of promise (you get the idea) gets major coverage.  Never mind that the youthenizing substance in question showed its promise in a Petri dish.  Just yesterday, the Times reported on “New Optimism” on resveratrol. It’s actually the same as the old optimism.  Lab-based studies have been intriguing for years.  Person-based studies, not so much.

That old if it sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true rule stands. I’ve just spent a year and a half doing deep research, interviewing both established medical scientists and veteran holistic practitioners, following up internet hyperbole, scouring peer reviewed journals – and trying some of this stuff myself.

There is promising research.  There are supplements, anti-oxidants and phytochemicals that appear to have some age-reversing affects.  In the lab.  In lab rats.  Worms.  Flies.  There’s very little solid, large-scale, placebo-controlled, double-blind testing in humans.  If you want to be smart about your Miracle Pill purchases, if you want to track the latest in good, scientific evidence, I suggest clicking over to this site. But mostly I’d suggest stopping the search for a miracle and starting to live the kind of active, health-conscious life, a rich intellectual, creative – even spiritual life — that will, in fact, increase vitality and turn back the biological clock.