Ageing & Longevity

Anti-Ageing Super-Supplement
University’s anti-ageing ‘super-supplement’ added years of full health and maintained mental agility Why do we become more susceptible to illness as we get older? Is a slow physical decline inevitable? What biological processes actually lead to ageing and ‘age-related disease? Can they be slowed or even reversed? Can supplements help – or are most supplements more hype than hope? Researchers at the Department of Biology at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, set out to answer those fundamental questions. Their recently published landmark study has dramatic implications for anyone interested in how to... Read more...
Stop or Even Reverse Ageing?
IS SLOW AGEING REALLY POSSIBLE? A friend of mine recently complained about a pain in her left knee. She then smiled ruefully and said, “Of course, that’s just my age”.  “But”, I pointed out, “you don’t have a pain in your right knee – and they are both the same age!” Ageing is defined as an accumulation of various types of damage involving a series of biological mechanisms at the cell level. Unchecked, these normally lead to a diminishing of physical and cognitive health. Outwardly, the indicators are greying hair,... Read more...
Build Healthier Cells for a Healthier Body - Part 3
PART THREE: SLOWING BIOLOGICAL AGEING See PART TWO: PROTECTING MITOCHONDRIA AND DNA Chromosomes are condensed rods of DNA and have four ‘arms’. They periodically divide along with cells and replicate to make copies of the DNA they contain. Each human cell normally contains 23 pairs of chromosomes, i.e., a total of 46. One chromosome in each pair is inherited from the mother, and the other from the father. The 23rd pair, the sex chromosome, determines your gender. Females have two copies of the X chromosome, one from each parent, while... Read more...
Build Healthier Cells for a Healthier Body - Part 2
PART TWO: PROTECTING MITOCHONDRIA AND DNA See PART ONE: THE CELL MEMBRANE Inside every body cell are mitochondria (the plural of mitochondrion) and a nucleus. (There are other elements, but these are the ones that we will concentrate on.) Mitochondria – the cell’s power plants Most cells – but not red blood cells – contain multiple mitochondria, which are cells within cells and are often likened to miniature ‘power plants’. Heart cells and muscle cells have the most mitochondria – sometimes hundreds – because they have high energy demands. Your mitochondria are where nutrients are... Read more...
Build Healthier Cells for a Healthier Body - Part 1
PART ONE: THE CELL MEMBRANE Take a look at the full stop at the end of this sentence. That’s about the size of the largest human cell, which is a female egg. By contrast, the smallest cell is a sperm cell, which is about 60 times smaller. You have about 200 different types of cells and, according to most estimates, about 75 trillion cells in your body. At any given moment, each cell is doing thousands of jobs, like creating and using energy, manufacturing proteins, building skin or bone, pumping out hormones... Read more...
Antioxidants – Pro or Anti? Theories of Ageing
Dr Paul Clayton’s Health Newsletter June 2014 New theories of ageing are emerging, which put antioxidants and free radicals in their place. Chronic inflammation as a degenerative disease promoter is overtaking the Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Ageing. Life and ageing used to be so simple. Findings that older organisms, from helminths to mice to men, tend to generate more free radicals in their cells (specifically, in their mitochondria), and show more signs of oxidative damage, gave rise to the Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Ageing. This iconic theory, otherwise known... Read more...
Best Vitamins for the Elderly
Ensuring older people have enough nutrition can be a challenge. It’s not just a question of preventing deficiency – the real focus should be on making sure they have the optimum range and optimum amount of the nutrients that can reduce the risk of what are termed ‘age-related’ illnesses. On average, metabolism declines by about 5% per decade, as much as 20% between ages 30 and 70. The result is that older people tend to eat less in order to control their weight, and less food means less nutrients. Additionally,... Read more...
Living Longer – Living Better …?
According to the crude stats, we’re living longer. According to the Global Burden ofDisease Study, an enormously expensive and rather fatuous exercise in number-crunching funded by the Gates Foundation and just published in the Lancet (Salomon et al ’13), global life expectancy has risen from 59 in 1990 to 70 today. According to the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry, all is increasingly for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds. And according to those who really know, this is claptrap. In fact, it is nothing short of a public health disaster.... Read more...
Can We Cure Ageing?
Makoto Koto is head of the Division of Anti-Ageing and Longevity Science at the University of Yokohama.  His fascinating argument on how and why we age can be summarised as follows. Evolution has programmed us to be healthy long enough to reproduce and pass on our genes. To do that, humans have evolved a sophisticated immune system that neutralises the frequent viral and bacterial (pathogen) attacks during the years before we have finished reproducing – ie have lived long enough to bring up children. An effective immune response, unfortunately, also... Read more...