5 September 2008
Julian Day:
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Waxing Crescent  38.502% waxing

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World’s Rarest Gemstones,
Metals, & Things
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Julian Day:
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Anti-Aging, Life Extension

Nixon & Elvis I won’t tell you exactly how old I am, but I will say I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and that I voted for Richard Nixon in my extreme youth before I had any notion of what a blackguard he was. Plus, when I’m in an elevator and notice another passenger sporting one of those through-the-tongue thingies, I feel like I’m going to pass out from vicarious pain.

Like all living creatures we exist in dynamic equilibrium. By day we deteriorate and wear ourselves out in a million different ways and then, largely during sleep, we repair the damage. Our skeletons recycle completely every seven years or so. Tiny muscle fibers tear and heal. We accidentally bang ourselves into something and thousands of capillaries shatter creating a bruise; then within a week or so, they grow back. We shed and replace about 3/4 of a pound (0.35 kg) of skin cells annually. Our teeth dissolve a bit when we eat or drink something acidic, then frantically re-mineralize in between.

But then the older we get, the further we fall behind on the catch-up side.

There are plenty of nutrients out there purported to slow down or possibly even reverse this unwelcome decline. Having explored this sort of thing for quite a few years for my own selfish purposes, I thought now would be a good time to distill as much of it down as possible to the handful that seem to be showing the hardest data in their favor. First, some news items on the subject:

18 Aug 2008: Methylene blue slows down mitochondrial dysfunction in human subjects
09 Aug 2008: Resveratrol doubles stamina and extends lifespan in mice
(The pharmaceutical version will be patentable and thus expensive, but not necessarily better.)
28 Jul 2008: Effect on arteries of Omega 3 fatty acids
01 Jul 2008: Citrulline relaxes blood vessels
23 Jun 2008: Chances of Dying From Heart Disease and Other Causes Rises With Decreasing Levels of Vitamin D
24 Jan 2007: Encouraging info on Phase 2 Carb Controller (Phaseolus vulgaris)
24 Feb 2002: Rat results using alpha-lipoic acid and acetyl-L-carnitine

Famous Centenarians
My former Toluca Lake neighbor (1903-2003)
Now the mainstream medical community raises many objections to the very notion of anti-aging or, indeed, the idea of using dietary supplements to enhance one’s health in general. They typically fall into one of two categories:

Who’s Your Daddy: The Food and Drug Administration (in the US) regulates all prescription and over-the-counter remedies. Pharmaceutical companies spend astronomical sums to develop and test their products every which way so they will earn the FDA’s approval for safety and effectiveness. Supplement advocates, what do they know?

Like many such bodies, the FDA and the businesses it regulates swim in the same murky water. FDA bureaucrats who play ball can look forward to cushy, high-paying jobs with pharmaceutical and medical equipment firms later on. Our absurdly under-resourced FDA does a serviceable job in spite of all of this, but we consumers have little cause for complacency. In 1998, for example, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported that around 106,000 people die every year from prescription drugs.

Faith Healing: Well, OK. A handful of these substances appear to alleviate or retard some of the age-related infirmities in laboratory subjects such as yeast, fruit flies, mice, and rats. But none of these things are people, so there’s no tangible evidence that they will do us any good or make anybody live even a day longer.

Laboratory animals have short lifespans so it’s easy to chart them from cradle to grave. No one I know has 150 years to devote to human studies. Maybe some day they’ll know for sure that Amino Acid X really does slow macular degeneration or dementia or atherosclerosis to a crawl, but by that time most of us will be dead and gone.

Omega 3
One of the Omega 3 Molecules
I’m going to present the following data in a form you don’t normally see. One of the problems with ordering supplements is that when you’re looking at total price, tablets per bottle, and dosage per tablet, it’s often hard to cost-compare all those competing brands. Sometimes you can tell at a glance, but usually it’s beyond what you can easily crunch in your head. The marketers know this, thus the flamboyant packaging, celebrity endorsements, and other puffery.

Directly below you can select the item and then see a listing in order of increasing unit cost. Obviously you might want to consider other criteria such as convenience and brand preference; but this is still a good start. You’ll be amazed how wildly a given product can vary in that respect from one brand to another.

Now it’s no secret that the supplement industry is pretty much unregulated and that some manufacturers are more honest than others about what you’re really getting in the bottle. (The notorious diet aid Hoodia is a textbook case. Little if any of it on the market is genuine and unadulterated.) Ultimately you’ll have to make your own judgements and keep abreast with the literature. Also, please note the disclaimer at the bottom of the page.

Peter
Stumble It

Choose an item:
Alpha-Lipoic Acid
Acetyl-L-Carnitine
Beta Sitosterol
Carnosine
Citrulline
Coenzyme Q-10
Lutein
Omega 3
“Phase 2”
Pycnogenol
Resveratrol
SOD
Theanine
Vitamin D



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