Another post focusing on a TED video that I cannot resist sharing and one that deserves very little commenting otherwise. Peter Diamandis, creator of the various X Prizes and Singularity University with my hero Ray Kurzweil, wrote the book by the same name. Watch his recent TED talk to get a sense of why I'm so excited to be alive now, hope to stick around awhile to witness his predictions come true, and am working right now on my own 10^9 project in learning technology. I promise that, like the TED audience here, you will feel like leaping to your feet in response to this one! 

The mainstream media has been inundated with negative news about supplements lately. One after another article has been published about how nutritional supplements (of the sort that I take every day) not only offer uncertain health benefits, but moreover that they might actually be bad for you. And I have to agree that, taken mindlessly without appropriate health data monitoring, that could very well be the case.

However, an article in CBC News was published today entitled Aging Slowed in Mice with Supplement Mix. It states:

It might be possible to cure aging, say scientists who've found that lab mice get smarter and more agile as they age when fed a mix of nutritional supplements. The diet and supplement plan isn't a conventional "cure." But the animal results at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., illustrate how investigators aim to slow down the aging process to avoid the physical and mental declines that often come as more candles are added to the birthday cake. At Prof. David Rollo's biology laboratory, mice that ate bagel bits soaked in a cocktail of supplements such as B vitamins, vitamin D, ginseng and garlic lived longer than those not taking the special mice chow."If you put them on a supplement, they actually learn better as they age," Rollo said. "They still don't live much longer but their brain function is remarkable."

It goes on to report:

The supplemented mice maintained their memory function in tests, such as remembering a familiar object. Their learning abilities were like those of very young mice, he said. Mice of the same age that were not supplemented behaved in lab tests like a frail 80-year-old woman. Most of the supplements Rollo and his team use are sold at health food stores. But he cautioned they are not something to be toyed with because the cocktail hasn't been tested to see if it is safe for people.The supplements cross the blood-brain barrier to affect the mitochondria "furnaces" in the brain in a fundamental way, he noted.

As usual, the article ended with the warning: "Scientists still don't how the supplements actually work and interact in the body." As with the complexities of the internal combustion engine, I don't understand how it all works either, but that doesn't stop me from driving my car. Based on results like these, I still take my own customized cocktail of supplements and enjoy the way they make me feel better every day.

Another very short post today, anchored by a video from Dr. Mike Evans of the Health Design Lab at the University of Toronto. In it, he asks the simple question: “Can you limit your sitting and sleeping to just 23.5 hrs per day?” You might think this a silly question until you realize that you probably spend virtually your entire day sleeping, couch-surfing, and sitting in a chair at your desk or at a meal. There are really just two scientifically-proven ways to extend the human lifespan -- calorie restriction and exercise. And the New York Times just published some recent evidence that exercise reduces your risk of developing Alzheimer's or change the course of the disease if you do.

So ...  what excuse do you have for just sittin' there on your butt?  Get up and move ... Now!

Another short post, this time a short 11-minute video that covers how sick our current healthcare system is and offers hope about how it will get better via mobile platforms, 24 hour at-home monitoring, artificial intelligence, social networking, massive data collection, crowd-sourcing, even a few tidbits from my passion of aviation. It's a TEDMed talk by stem cell researcher Dr. Daniel Kraft:

Another year, another birthday, more wrinkles and sagging jowls. Honestly, this 61st year has turned out to be a bit more difficult than past ones, as I fought and more or less held my own in the good fight against belly fat and sedentary behaviors (like what I'm doing now), but had to helplessly watch my jaw sag, my face wrinkle, and my skin harden at an ever-accelerating pace. I sometimes stand in front of the mirror and pinch my cheeks upward to simulate an "ear tuck" so that the lines magically disappear and my face returns to a better-looking 40-year-old me. Never all that handsome, but certainly more pleasing than the jowly visage that stares back at me now.

My sweet wife tells me that I'm holding up well and being much too picky, that she, too, at the tender age of 50 is watching the years steal away her youth. As an aficionado of Ray Kurzweil's theory of exponential change, when I compare what I witnessed in my own body just this past year against what I see around me in other people in their 6th decade of life, I realize that the almost-imperceptible physical decline that I started noticing in my 50s is giving way to ever more extreme degradation in my 60s, and will presumably continue its inexorable acceleration as I reach my 70s, 80s, and beyond, ultimately spreading from my face to all other aspects of my physical being. Think of the story of the lily pad in the pond that doubles every day -- even if it takes days or weeks for the pond to become half covered ("not so bad"), it'll only take one more day for it to be totally choked with lilies. I'm feeling the same sort of nudge on my internal accelerometer.

What I'm hoping is that the amazing progress in longevity science that characterized just this past year will itself demonstrate exponential growth. After years of haggling with the US government to get approval to perform experimental stem cell surgery in SoCal, Suzanne Somers actually regrew breast tissue lost to a previous mastectomy. And overall, tissue engineering in 2011 has grown in leaps and bounds: There has been pancreas regeneration, more engineered trachea transplants, building of urethras, blood vessels, and mouse teeth. Which is not to mention small intestine sections, decellularized lungs, and the construction of a working sphincter. An important confirmation of the role of senescent cells in aging was accomplished in mice.  And there were even a few happy surprises that occurred the old fashioned way, such as a study showing an unexpected five year effect on human longevity (a good half the expected effect of regular exercise), from an established medical treatment.

So my fervent hope is that neither my wife nor I will get fed up enough with our saggy skin and new-wrinkle-a-day that we let the butchers, er ah, plastic surgeons have their way with us. Rather, I pray that we can hold out for an injection, pill, or creme engineered from our own stem cells to rejuvenate these faces that we used to be so fond of. People accused Steve Jobs of "magical thinking," and indeed it may have killed him this past year when it delayed his choice of traditional cancer treatment. But it also allowed him to leave our world with the magical devices that have transformed our daily lives.

Happy New Year, everyone! May 2012 bring to us more and faster progress towards that magical fountain of youth that comes not from a Shangri-La but from a thousand nano- and bio-technologists working long hours in their not-so-magical labs.

I am so looking forward to this movie, now in production from Jason Silva:

There is much more information about what he's up to, as well as few more shorts to watch, over at Singularity Hub. This is a gifted young filmmaker that we should all follow closely ...
 

While it may pain us to acknowledge it, we baby boomers are the root cause of America's financial problems. More than a third of the federal budget goes to transfer payments and services for people age 65 or older, and the bill is increasing as more and more people live longer. Social Security was designed in 1935, when almost everyone died before reaching retirement age (the average life expectancy of someone born that year was about 60; today it's about 80). Medical break-throughs have allowed us to live on average another 15 years beyond that milestone. And since about half of all healthcare services are consumed by the five percent of the population that is dying -- that is, mostly old people -- we boomers are becoming serious drags on the American economy.

Heart disease, of which I have spoken often and passionately here, is the leading cause of death in America. Responding and living with it are not cheap. But by far the most expensive death-causing disease is cancer, which roughly one in three Americans are presently likely to see touch their lives. It's a long, drawn-out, tiresome terminal disease with only very expensive and ridiculously expensive options for aggressive treatment. But ... what if both its early diagnosis and treatment could be made far more efficient, effective, and inexpensive? I see such possibilities on our immediate (this decade) horizon, and would like to share some of them with you here. 

1. How about a $100 blood test for early detection of all cancers? That's what seems promised from a bio-tech company called OnoCyte Inc. Click here for a short video introduction from its CEO Dr. Joseph Wagner. 

2. Even cooler: How about a nanotech-derived hunter-killer drug that specifically targets cancer cells? A company named Bexion has developed a drug that consists of a nanotech joining of two naturally occurring substances found in human cells. Together, they have the ability to exploit one of the few characteristics that all cancer cell share, the transfer of phosphatidylserines to cell wall exteriors to fend off immune response. When this new drug is administered, these nano-probes seek out phosphatidylserines and collect on the surface of cancer cells. There they trigger natural cell suicide, or apoptosis. Cancers die but healthy cells are unharmed. It's been shown effective in preclinical tests against an extraordinary range of cancers.

3. And then there's a company called Inovio that is a leader in DNA vaccines. Using an extremely small electrical pulse, the company puts engineered DNA plasmids into cells. These circular rings of DNA utilize the body's own genetic mechanisms to manufacture RNA proteins that train and mobilize the immune system to attack various diseases, including cancers. Inovio is in Phase II human tests for both leukemia and cervical displasia. Positive results in HIV and hepatitis-C show the adaptability of this technology for treatment of a wide range of diseases.

4. Galectin Therapeutics is the leader in an entirely new field of science known as glycoscience, which involves the use of complex carbohydrates – essentially foods – as drugs. One of the deadly characteristics of cancer tumors is their ability to protect themselves by producing proteins that bind with sugars. These are galectin-3s, and tumors use them to create a lethal cloaking field that allows them to hide from our immune systems. T cells have evolved to attack disease, but when T cells encounter a cancer's lethal galectin net, they are shut down and eventually die. Galectin Therapeutics' naturally-occurring plant sugars have the nearly unbelievable ability to protect and resurrect dying T cells. The Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research is funding Phase I/II clinical tests of a Galectin Therapeutics carbohydrate drug in conjunction with a melanoma vaccine.

Bottom line for me: As a nation, we must insure our financial survival by raising the retirement age (albeit gradually) as longevity technologies continue to lengthen our productive life spans. Eighty is the new sixty, and all that. Personally, we must do everything we can to prevent cancer (eat food, not too much, mostly plants; stay away from as many toxic substances and people as you can; lose weight; exercise; love and be loved by someone; etc.). If we have or get cancer soon, we are still probably faced with surgery and/or radiation and/or chemotherapy (that Star Trek's Dr. McCoy rightly calls "barbaric"). But before too long (years not decades) we are likely to be seeing vaccinations against, inexpensive comprehensive tests for, and drugs that cure a multiplicity of cancers. And then, we may be able to tell our great-grandchildren horror stories of something they'll never have to personally experience.

Cupcakes may be addictive, just like cocaine.

A growing body of medical research at leading universities and government laboratories suggests that processed foods and sugary drinks made by the likes of PepsiCo Inc. and Kraft Foods Inc. aren’t simply unhealthy. They can hijack the brain in ways that resemble addictions to cocaine, nicotine and other drugs.

“The data is so overwhelming the field has to accept it,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “We are finding tremendous overlap between drugs in the brain and food in the brain.”

So begins a recent article in Bloomberg News written by Robert Langreth and Duane D. Stanford. In the article, they cite study after scientific study -- 28 just this year alone -- that suggest sugary foods, particularly those sweetened with deadly high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), produce addictive behavior patterns and brain scans not unlike drugs cause. They write, "As the evidence expands, the science of addiction could become a game changer for the $1 trillion food and beverage industries. If fatty foods and snacks and drinks sweetened with sugar and HFCS are proven to be addictive, food companies may face the most drawn-out consumer safety battle since the anti-smoking movement took on the tobacco industry a generation ago ...

In one 2010 study, scientists at Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida, fed rats an array of fatty and sugary products including Hormel Foods Corp. bacon, Sara Lee Corp. pound cake, The Cheesecake Factory Inc. cheesecake and Pillsbury Co. Creamy Supreme cake frosting. The study measured activity in regions of the brain involved in registering reward and pleasure through electrodes implanted in the rats. The rats that had access to these foods for one hour a day started binge eating, even when more nutritious food was available all day long. Other groups of rats that had access to the sweets and fatty foods for 18 to 23 hours per day became obese, Paul Kenny, the Scripps scientist heading the study wrote in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The results produced the same brain pattern that occurs with escalating intake of cocaine, he wrote. “To see food do the same thing was mind-boggling,” Kenny later said in an interview.

In another 2010 study, psychologists at Princeton University began studying whether lab rats could become addicted to a 10 percent solution of sugar water, about the same percentage of sugar contained in most soft drinks. An occasional drink caused no problems for the lab animals. Yet the researchers found dramatic effects when the rats were allowed to drink sugar-water every day. Over time they drank “more and more and more” while eating less of their usual diet, said Nicole Avena, who began the work as a graduate student at Princeton and is now a neuroscientist at the University of Florida. The animals also showed withdrawal symptoms, including anxiety, shakes and tremors, when the effect of the sugar was blocked with a drug. The scientists, moreover, were able to determine changes in the levels of dopamine in the brain, similar to those seen in animals on addictive drugs. And while the animals didn't become obese on sugar water alone, they became overweight when Avena and her colleagues offered them water sweetened with HFCS.

You owe it to yourself to read and study the original article and its many references. Many other studies were cited, along with the usual "balancing" pablum from the food industry that more study is needed and that nothing is wrong with what PepsiCo Chief Executive Officer Indra Nooyi calls “fun-for-you” foods, if eaten in moderation. Yeah, sure -- shades of the tobacco industry from decades ago. I hope that this battle ends at least as well as that one did.

While we wait for the rest of the world to catch on to the addictive nature of these so-callled "fun-for-you" foods, the informed amongst us can simply choose to treat them exactly the same way that we treat other addictive substances, and just say no. Your future 150-year-old body will thank you for it.

I'm going to summarize and borrow heavily from a report that I just read originally published by Life Extension Foundation in 2007 with the same title, "Reversing Atherosclerosis Naturally." This subject is near and dear to my heart, literally. I almost died about 13 years ago from a heart attack. A cardiologist in Austin saved my life with an emergency angioplasty, leaving behind a stent in my 98% clogged Left Anterior Descending (LAD) artery. A couple of months after that, I moved to La Jolla, CA near the ocean, where my wife helped me make all the prescribed lifestyle changes and then some, including chelation and accupuncture. But then, a routine checkup about 7 months later indicated that the stent (not pre-medicated in those days) was itself getting clogged up. After yet another angioplasty procedure, this one twice as long as before, I went home with another two stents permanently installed near my heart. This Scripps doctor, one of the best and most competent I've had the pleasure of knowing, commented afterwards something to the effect, "Be careful with those arteries -- it's awfully messed up in there. I had a really hard time with this one." He left me on the usual Lipitor prescription, which a subsequent cardiologist upgraded to Crestor after it came to market in 2003 as the "big gun" statin. 

In an earlier post here, I've stated that I believe Crestor® saved my life. Even so, Crestor puts a heavy load on your kidneys and has a known side-effect of reducing your levels of CoQ-10 antioxidants. I'm worried about staying on it, or its successors, for the rest of my now-expected-to-be-very-long life. Even Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, authors of Fantastic Voyage (reviewed earlier here), have reservations about long-term statin therapy. Given my genetic and familial history, however, I didn't feel comfortable just stopping it cold-turkey. 

This article may change my mind about that. A 2007 clinical trial published in the influential Journal of the American Medical Association indicated that the cholesterol-lowering statin drug Crestor® (rosuvastatin), is capable of slowing the progression of silent subclinical atherosclerosis. As expected, over the course of two years, a high dose (40 mg) of Crestor® significantly lowered harmful lipid levels. But it merely slowed or halted atherosclerosis progression—it did not produce regression. In the investigators’ own words: “Rosuvastatin [Crestor®] did not induce disease regression.”

According to the Life Extension article I'm going to summarize here, in sharp contrast to the above study, a nutritional supplement derived from a unique species of melon was shown recently to not only halt the progression of atherosclerosis in apparently healthy adults, but also to significantly reverse its progression over the course of two years. Impressive new research indicates that a patented form of the natural antioxidant superoxide dismutase (SOD) significantly reverses IMT (intima-media thickness) progression. Known as the “enzyme of life” when it was first discovered in the late 1960s, SOD is considered the body’s most important antioxidant defense enzyme. Noting that certain varieties of cantaloupe had an exceptionly long shelf life, food scientists found that these melons provided an exceptionally rich source of SOD. Still, this SOD remained stubbornly unavailable to the body when consumed orally. Until, that is, French researchers pioneered a method to “cloak” a natural melon-derived SOD molecule with gliadin (a simple protein derived from wheat), protecting it from the harsh acidic environment of the stomach and intestines long enough for the bioactive SOD enzyme to be absorbed intact into the bloodstream. Dubbed GliSODin®, this compound has been thoroughly documented to be a particularly potent orally bioavailable form of SOD.

About a year and a half after commencing daily supplementation with GliSODin®, measurable decreases in subjects’ IMT were detected. Approximately two years after starting GliSODin® supplementation, decreases in IMT values became statistically significant. In dramatic contrast, control subjects not receiving GliSODin® experienced increased IMT values over the same period. There were no reported side effects in either group.

This remarkable study demonstrated that reversal of atherosclerosis in adults with multiple risk factors for future cardiovascular disease is possible through a combination of healthy diet and daily intake of GliSODin® (orally bioavailable superoxide dismutase). These findings were confirmed by monitoring of clinical and biological health parameters, and measurements of carotid IMT. The GliSODin® regimen, “improves, significantly, the anti-oxidant status,” noted investigators, "and diminishes, remarkably, carotid artery IMT."

The same article goes on to state that pomegranate juice extract has also demonstrated efficacy as a powerful source of antioxidants. It concludes, "By including orally bioavailable DOS with pomegranate juice extract in your daily program, you may help prevent or even reverse the accumulation of deadly atherosclerotic plaque in your arteries." 

Rest assured that I will be adding these two relatively inexpensive substances into my own daily regime (about $20/month for the GliSODin and whatever you care to spend in the grocery store for pomegranate juice). Not sure yet what to do about the Crestor . . .