May You Be Forever Young

Sentient Developments: Savulescu, Bostrom and de Grey: Why we need a war on aging

From The 20 worst foods of 2009, we get the Baskin-Robbins Large Chocolate Oreo Shake. It has:

more sugar (266 grams) than 20 bowls of Froot Loops, more calories (2,310) than 11 actual Heath Bars, and more ingredients (73) than you’ll find in most chemist labs.

Slow death in a single cup. Do the world a favour and avoid this.

The International Herald Tribune has One man’s 3-year experiment in eating organic food - all the time. Not surprisingly, the guy found it hard to be 100% organic 100% of the time.

He chose three years as a goal because that was the amount of time it took to have a breeding animal certified organic by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. While food growers comply with organic regulations every day, Greene wondered whether a person could meet the same standards.

It hasn’t been easy.

“This isn’t a way of eating I could recommend to anybody else because it’s so far off the beaten food grid,” said Greene, 49, the founder of a popular Web site about children’s health, drgreene.com. “It was much more challenging than I thought it would be, and I thought it would be tough. There were definitely days where there was nothing I could find that was organic.”

And the results:

Greene said he was inspired to go all-organic after talking to a dairy farmer who noted that livestock got sick less after a switch to organic practices. He wondered if becoming 100 percent organic might improve his own health.

Three years later, he says he has more energy and wakes up earlier.

As a pediatrician regularly exposed to sick children, he was accustomed to several illnesses a year. Now, he says, he is rarely ill. His urine is a brighter yellow, a sign that he is ingesting more vitamins and nutrients

Good for him.

Photo by aymlis

Wired reports on New Longevity Drugs Poised to Tackle Diseases of Aging.

Not long ago, the silver-bullet approach was disregarded, and it’s still far from achieving a consensus in the scientific community. But standard research approaches to cancer, dementia and heart disease have provided relatively small benefits, and evidence has continued to accumulate in favor of Wallace and like-minded researchers who advocate a mitochondrial theory of disease.

The new drugs work by stimulating enzymes that regulate the function of mitochondria. Hundreds of these structures are found in every cell in the body, ceaselessly converting glucose into usable energy. But over time, mitochondria degenerate. They lose strength and efficiency, releasing highly reactive oxygen molecules that bind easily with other molecules and wreak cellular havoc.

A growing number of scientists suspect that the breakdown of mitochondria is among the most important causes of cell-level changes that eventually cause the body’s tissues to degenerate with age. The damage accumulates gradually until hitting some critical mass of malfunction, at which point diseases arrive rapidly. That may be why so many diseases first occur during middle age, and become steadily more common afterwards.

Magic bullets rule!

Science News reports Telomere Enzyme A Likely Key To Longevity. Perhaps not startlingly surprising by now, but here it is, reported:

A new experiment suggests that the enzyme telomerase can extend the lifespan of mice by about 26 percent.

Some cells can keep dividing forever, essentially becoming immortal thanks in part to telomerase. But evidence for whether this enzyme affects aging and longevity in larger organisms such as people has been muddled and contradictory.

While the enzyme enables cells to keep dividing, it also takes cells one step closer to growing and proliferating out of control — that is, becoming cancerous. Lab animals with extra genes for telomerase often die young from tumors.

Reporting in the Nov. 14 Cell, researchers in Spain engineered mice to have not only an extra copy of the gene for telomerase, but also extra antitumor genes to combat the enzyme’s cancer-causing potential. In the altered mice, signs of aging such as poor coordination or degraded tissue health were delayed compared to mice that had only the extra copies of anti-tumor genes, the team reports.

This one is half a year old, but in case you missed it, Wired did a great interview with futurist Ray Kurzweil.

Kurzweil does not believe in half measures. He takes 180 to 210 vitamin and mineral supplements a day, so many that he doesn’t have time to organize them all himself. So he’s hired a pill wrangler, who takes them out of their bottles and sorts them into daily doses, which he carries everywhere in plastic bags. Kurzweil also spends one day a week at a medical clinic, receiving intravenous longevity treatments. The reason for his focus on optimal health should be obvious: If the singularity is going to render humans immortal by the middle of this century, it would be a shame to die in the interim. To perish of a heart attack just before the singularity occurred would not only be sad for all the ordinary reasons, it would also be tragically bad luck, like being the last soldier shot down on the Western Front moments before the armistice was proclaimed.

A lot of it will be familiar if you’ve read any of his books, like Fantastic Voyage. It is certainly interesting to see his take on things.

Photo by Rennio Maifredi from the Wired article.

In Search of Enlightenment, a piece on Why Worry About Aging?, an extensive post which looks at the aging issue from the point of view of risk taking and biogerontology.

When people ask me what I am working on I inevitably mention aging and the aspiration to retard human aging. This provokes many different responses. The most common response is a sense of surprise that we might actually be able to do something about aging. This is of course understandable, for if one had not been following the field of biogerontology for the past few years one might assume that aging is immutable, for that was a common belief. But this belief has been proven wrong- aging is not immutable.

Once I note this people often persist in their scepticism, and express doubt that we could actually develop a technology that could slow aging in humans (rather than just in mice). Again, this scepticism is understandable, indeed some scepticism is warranted. But I often ask them how much scepticism they have about finding a cure for cancer, or reversing climate change. And when it comes to these issues they are pretty optimistic about the likelihood that these goals could be achieved.

So I push them a bit further… and it becomes evident that this optimism is not based on any scientific experiments that demonstrate a particular therapy could cure all 200+ types of cancer, or that climate experiments demonstrated that we could reverse the rise in global temperature. What their optimism is based upon is the desire to achieve these things, that they would create enormous benefits for humanity. Again, I understand the appeal of this line of thinking. We want to believe that we can achieve those things that would really do a lot of good in the world.

And:

And so at some level everyone knows, to some degree, that aging is a big problem for them as individuals. No one enjoys the fact that their risk of cancer, heart disease, stroke, AD, etc. will continue to rise for all of their remaining years. When in certain moods, we can all admit this. But we don’t want to go on and on about it every day. It’s depressing! And so we tend to bury these feelings deep inside and go on with our daily activities wearing “aging-blinders”.

And so we find there is an enormous disconnect between what the public actually demands of their governments- like protection from terrorists, tackling abortion , etc.- and what would actually substantively improve their lives. If you really want government to reduce your chances of death and disease, then get behind aging research. If there was no chance that scientists could actually develop a drug or intervention that could modify the rate at which the molecular and cellular damage of aging occurs then it would be cruel to tell people to “worry about aging”. But given where the science actually is, it is irrational and irresponsible *not* to tell them to worry about aging. Especially when people fear so many things that really do not pose a great threat to their health and well being.

Via Fight Aging.

Brap!! Ouroboros points us to research aimed at creating beer that is high in resveratrol.

Yeast has taught us a great deal about the mechanisms of aging. But what about using yeast to fight the aging process itself?

A group of young scientists is trying to genetically engineer brewer’s yeast to make resveratrol, an antioxidant compound that activates sirtuins and may or may not extend mammalian lifespan (link):

Eins, zwei, g’suffa!

In Watermelon Packs a Powerful Lycopene Punch, the USDA sings the praises of watermelon for lycopene (that stuff that makes a tomato red and is a good antioxidant).

Watermelon is fat free and is a source of vitamins A, B6, C, and thiamin. Studies have shown that a cup and a half of watermelon contains about 9 to 13 milligrams of lycopene. On average, watermelon has about 40 percent more lycopene than raw tomatoes. Red, ripe flesh is the best indicator of the sweetest and most nutritious watermelon, though it’s hard to choose the ripest melon when it’s uncut.

Time to nom nom nom.

Photo by CurlyCam

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Googling is good for geriatrics.

A team of US researchers has found that searching the internet stimulates brain activity in the elderly and middle-aged and may help keep their minds sharp.

And:

The UCLA scientists found that searching the web triggers key centres in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning and may help stimulate and possibly improve brain function.

“The study results are encouraging, that emerging computerised technologies may have physiological effects and potential benefits for middle-aged and older adults,” said Dr Gary Small, the principal investigator of the study.

“Internet searching engages complicated brain activity, which may help exercise and improve brain function,” said Small, a professor at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behaviour.

So does it matter what you Google for? Does looking for the latest in longevity research differ from searching for celeb gossip or political pap?

You’d hope so.

Anyway, keep Googling.