HEALTH NOTES

Energy, the Key to Aging

With every patient that I treat in my office for nutritional counseling, I feel it is extremely important for them to understand that our ultimate goal with nutritional advice and implementation of nutritional recommendations is to affect their body on a cellular level. In other words, the nutrients and micronutrients that we are introducing into theft bodies should ultimately be carried to and absorbed by virtually every cell in their body, and utilized within the cells themselves.

It is important when discussing and visualizing the human body that we understand that a cell is a microcosm in and of itself. Cellular respiration occurs every microsecond producing energy that is utilized throughout the body. A chain of events occurs in structures called the mitochondria throughout the body in each individual cell. This process, that takes sugar molecules in various forms, and through a tiered process, produces energy for the cells to utilize.

Recently, a group of Swedish researchers has performed a study on mice which they altered the energy producing systems in theft cells. A study performed at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm is a first one which links the aging process to damage the energy producing mitochondria on the cellular level. Symptoms they produce by merely damaging these mitochondria genetically included early hair loss, thinning of the bones, or osteoporosis, and less body fat, loss of the ability to reproduce. According to Dr. Niles-Goran Larsson, the lead researcher on this study, “all animals, or all humans, have exactly the same problems.”

These animals also lived about 1/3 of their normal life span once these genetic alterations to the energy producing mitochondria took place. The findings of this study have been published in the British journal, Nature. They indicate that genetic cumulative damage throughout our lifetimes cause perhaps totally, or perhaps partially, the aging process.

According to George Martin and Lawrence Loeb of the University of Washington in Seattle, the obvious next study should go a step Thrther to see if keeping the mitochondria from becoming damaged would cause “lengthened, not abbreviated, life spans.”

Other studies have been successful in expanding the life spans of flies and worms in a laboratory study. Obviously, these studies may lead to our understanding of how to keep individuals healthy for longer, and to avoid the “normal” symptoms of aging, and ultimately to extend our healthy life span.

We discussed in a previous article the cautions we must take in applying genetic engineering principles to human beings; however, at this stage the research potentials appear to be boundless, and the information we are gaining, immeasurable.