Report on Harvard's Healthy Aging Conference - opinions welcome

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"Longevinex" info@... (10/01/09)

Commentary on Harvard Medical School's Aging & Healthy Lifespan Conference: Dare I be so candid to say that longevity researchers may be slowing progress towards the discovery of the fountain of youth? Of course, everybody slants their predictions and science to fit their desires, not humanity's. Drug company execs want humanity to wait for their drug, and researchers would rather the fountain of youth be discovered after they have retired so as to ensure they will have a lifetime of research grants.

Surprisingly "indefinite lifespan" advocate Aubrey de Grey says the fountain of youth is still decades from realization and MIT professor Leonard Guarente says it will take 100 years before humanity discovers how to add another 25 healthy years to the human lifespan.

Don't tell the French that the fountain of youth has not been invented yet. The legions of French centenarians have grown from 8000 in the year 2000 to 20,000 in 2008. The French are finally learning to abandon tobacco but continue drinking their dark, aged red wine, which provides an array of molecules that outperform the best anti-aging pill invented to date.

All the talk of a single molecule like resveratrol prolonging human life, or even the lifespan of laboratory mice, has yet to be demonstrated. Only mice engorged with a high-fat (60% fat calories) lived a bit longer when given resveratrol, and high-dose resveratrol actually shortened the life of lab animals on a standard-calorie (25% fat calories) diet. In a human study, all that 5000 mg of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals highly touted SRT501 resveratrol drug could do was modestly reduce blood sugar levels two hours after ingestion of a meal.

de Grey touts the mitochondrial theory of aging, which cannot be denied and which he was not the first to describe, but fails to recognize experiments done in animal labs years ago already demonstrated how to reverse biological aging using metal chelators to eradicate lipofuscin, the cellular debris that progressively accumulates in living cells.

Lipofuscin is believed to be the first marker of aging, accumulating soon after childhood growth has ceased (~age 18 years). Such an intervention reinvigorates the cell cleansing mechanism of autophagy (lysosomal bodies within living cells literally cannibalize cellular garbage), thus restoring a youthful state to the cell.

Verily, a soon-to-be-published paper written by Stuart Richer OD, PhD, of the North Chicago Veterans Medical Center, describes a non-invasive method to measure lipofuscin in humans (retinal imaging) and presents the case of an 80-year old man given a mineral-chelating nutriceutical (Longevinex) which correlated with measurable improvement in visual function and the disappearance of lipofuscin. This proof-of-principle study suggests a day in the not too distant future when humans can determine their biological age and utilize mineral-chelators to reverse the clock-hands of biological time.

Albeit, before a middle-aged man will ever meet a 40-ish looking woman who has actually had 92 birthdays, as researcher Kenyon predicts, researchers are going to have to reach beyond cellular aging to understand what causes connective tissue to degrade -- resulting in wrinkled skin, thinning hair and stiff joints. To this end, technologies which promote youthful production of hyaluronan, the body's water-holding gel that insulates nerves, cushions joints, moistures skin, and serves as a scaffolding for the body, will have to be addressed. Longevinex has already reached beyond what longevity researchers are now talking about with its Longevinex Advantage nutriceutical that is the first to address cellular and connective tissue aging.

Humanity need not hold its breath for an anti-aging pill. The mechanisms that control longevity genes via mineral chelation are now reasonably understood. There is no other explanation given as to why the human body ages at three different speeds:

childhood growth -- no cellular aging correlated with minerals directed towards growth of bone, collagen and red blood cells;

post-growth adulthood -- progressive aging with accumulative mineralization;

late life reduction in the rate of aging correlated with reaching a steady state of mineralization.

So far, the over-mineralization theory of aging has not been challenged.

The French have their red wine, the Japanese their green tea and miso soup, which provide the small molecules that control mineralization and aging. Americans await a pill.Bill Sardi

For a report on Harvard Medical School's Aging & Healthy Lifespan Conference, written By: Aineko Hplus Magazine Date Published: September 23, 2009,