HOW TO LIVE LONGER
Youth in a bottle getting closer
February 26, 2010
Nicole Baute
LIVING REPORTER, Toronto Star
We pop vitamin C pills to fight colds, melatonin to help us sleep and green tea extract to try to lose weight and even avoid cancer.
Now researchers think over-the-counter supplements might be able to stave off old age.
Scientists in a McMaster University lab believe they are on the cusp of developing an antidote for aging, using antioxidants and nutrients – including green tea extract, melatonin and a host of vitamins – available in drug and health food stores.
With 30 ingredients known to tackle the key mechanisms of aging, biologist David Rollo and his team have been able to extend lifespans and keep seniors active and spry.
The ingredients have little proven effectiveness on their own but, together, they seem to comprise the fountain of youth.
At least, a tiny, mouse-sized fountain.
Rollo stresses that the scientists don't yet understand how the ingredients work together and that expensive clinical trials are needed to find out whether there would be any side effects in humans. Even so, Rollo, who is in his early 60s, admits he is on a complex anti-aging diet, taking supplements at specific times of day to link them to the body's aging-related processes, which occur on a 24-hour clock.
And he is confident that help for mankind in general is in reach – perhaps in the form of a time-release capsule.
"If you can basically slow down aging, you could slow down heart disease, you could slow down or ameliorate or prevent your degenerative conditions, you could basically slow down or prevent many of the cancers," Rollo says.
"So, that's the real ticket. It (the supplement cocktail) is not going to prevent them but it might give you some more good years."
By the time regular mice reach 22 months of age (which is like 70 or 80 in human years), they experience a 50 per cent decline in movement and become hunchbacked, arthritic and thin. Mice on Rollo's daily supplement, instead of ossifying into involuntary couch potatoes, carried on in their cages as if they were still teenagers – or at least 20-somethings.
Examining the mice's brains, Rollo and his team found that the supplements were actually affecting the mitochondria, molecular furnaces that run the body. With the cocktail supplement, the mitochondria produced fewer "free radicals," which are thought to be the cause of aging. The results were reported in a recent Experimental Biology and Medicine paper.
Rollo and his crew also have worked with crickets. One naturally expected to live about 120 days recently died at age 257 days, by way of dietary restrictions and the supplement.
"Our diet will give you 10 per cent (life extension) – if you're a mouse," Rollo says. "Which would be about 10 to 15 years in a human."
Statistics Canada reported this week that life expectancy continues to rise, with babies born between 2005 and 2007 likely to live an average of 80.7 years.
Still, the search for the long-sought fountain of youth has intensified. At Harvard Medical School, for example, scientist David Sinclair and his team discovered a red wine extract called resveratrol extended the lives of lab mice by 15 per cent.
Other research has shown that Rapamycin, a drug used as an immunosuppressant in organ-transplant patients, can extend the lives of mice – though there are concerns that in humans it would lower tolerance to infectious illnesses.
Author Dan Buettner and his organization, Blue Zones, recommend a holistic approach based on observations of long-lived people worldwide. They say to cut food intake by a fifth, connect with religion and family, drink red wine consistently but in moderation, and move naturally, rather than with the aid of labour-saving devices.
Dr. Luigi Fontana, an associate professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine (also director of the Division of Nutrition and Aging at the Italian National Institute of Health in Rome), is studying how a restricted diet can promote healthy aging. His concern is that the average life expectancy for an Italian woman is 81, but health problems typically begin around 50, creating a 30-year quality-of-life gap.
"Thirty years, it's basically more than a third of your life, one-half of your life, spent in pain, with doctors, hospitals, treatment and surgery, and this and that," he says.
In Fontana's ideal future, humans would easily live until age 90, without suffering, and then die a swift death.
That is Jennifer Lemon's dream, too. "Basically, in an ideal situation," says the research scientist, "people would live normal, healthy, productive lives and then would die of some sort of organ failure.
"So it would be a sort of quick decline opposed to the long slow slide that humans experience now."
Lemon, who did her PhD with Rollo and is now at McMaster's Centre for Probe Development and Commercialization, has a personal motivation: when she was an undergraduate student, her 84-year-old grandmother died after spending the final years of her life suffering from dementia.
Lemon conducted an award-winning project on mice, finding a cocktail supplement increased the mice's stress resistance to radiation and allowed them to live at least 11 per cent longer lives. Without such intervention, Lemon found that regular mice had problems similar to her grandmother's. As they aged, they lost the ability to learn and became easily confused in their maze.
The human desire to understand and delay aging goes back as far as the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest known pieces of literature, says Andrea Charise, a PhD candidate in the English department at the University of Toronto. She says the present-day frenzy can perhaps be best traced to the 17th and 18th centuries, when society became more secular.
"If there's no afterlife ... then you want to live with all of your earthly possessions for as long as you can, here," she explains.
Charise sees present-day anti-aging endeavours as expressions of a long-standing anxiety and thinks Oscar Wilde said it best when he famously wrote: "The tragedy of old age is not that one is old but that one is young."
LONG-LIFE COCKTAIL
Biologist David Rollo and his team of researchers at McMaster University have had success feeding mice a concoction of ingredients that can be bought in drug and health food stores. The supplement cocktail includes:
Vitamins B1, B3, B6, B12, C, D and E
Acetyl L-carnitine
Alpha-lipoic acid
Acetylsalicylic acid
Beta carotene
Bioflavonoids
Chromium picolinate
Folic acid
Garlic, ginger root extract
Ginkgo biloba, ginseng
Green tea extract
L-Glutathione
Magnesium
Manganese
Melatonin
N-acetyl cysteine
Potassium
Rutin
Selenium
Cod liver oil (Omega 3)
Coenzyme Q10
Flaxseed oil
According to Dan Buettner, author of The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest, these tips gathered from far-flung corners of the world can keep you youthful:
LIFESTYLE TIPS TO PROMOTE YOUTHFULNESS
Find ways to move naturally, such as walking, gardening and using fewer labour-saving devices.
Find a purpose in life, and pursue it with passion.
Slow down: work less, rest and take vacations.
Stop eating when you're 80 per cent full.
Eat more vegetables, less protein and less processed foods.
Drink red wine consistently, but in moderation.
Belong to a healthy social network.
Engage in spiritual activities.
Make family a priority.
