More on Telomeres Telomerase Supplements and Cancer

I have written a ton on these topics before and I refer you to here for more background.

Briefly:

Telomeres are small segments of DNA at the end of every chromosome. They function like biologic time clocks determining when a cell will die. They are very sensitive to life style, toxins, stress, diet, supplements and nutrition, sleep deprivation and sedentary behavior.

Of the half dozen or so supplements that make claims to influence your telomere length, only TA-65 has any human data that suggests efficacy..

There is also an ongoing debate about the role of telomeres and telomerase in cancer which spills over needlessly into the supplement discussion.

Here that is in a nutshell:

Some scientists believe that telomere shortening and cell death is “anti-cancer” because a cell with short telomeres is more likely to have genetic mistakes encoded in its DNA.

Other scientists believe that restoration of telomere length may foster repair of the genome in much the same way that fixing “cancerous mitochondria” may revert the cell back to health. I am one of those and I base my feelings on the work of Maria Blasco who showed that increasing telomerase levels extended lifespan in mice without any increases in cancer incidence. I also postulate that all other areas of cellular aging had to improve such as mitochondrial function, intracellular junk clearing and epigentic marks or the animals could not have lived longer.  Sadly the study was not powered to “prove “ that but I sincerely doubt you could have an animal live longer without at least arresting those problems if not reversing them.

Almost all human cancers have short telomeres on average.  More importantly it may not take an average drop in telomere length to cause or facilitate cancer. More likely a few critically short telomeres on the “wrong” chromosome are enough.

The reason we do not yet have an answer is because the technology that is used in many studies to assay telomere length is not capable of giving us that data. As more and more people use the Life Length assay we will get more data.  At some point I hope the scientific community will universally switch over the way many anti-aging docs like me have.

Approximately 85% of human cancers deal with short telomeres by massive increases in the enzyme telomerase.  I have to say it: that means that 15% do not and they use a non-telomerase based mechanism to extend their telomeres.

This has led some people to worry about increasing telomerase with supplements.  Won’t this increase the risk of cancer or worsen a cancer if you have it?

Not likely to both statements.  Cancerous transformation is not and never has been dependent on telomerase. Once you have cancer the cancer will hijack telomerase for its own purposes to a degree that makes adding a telomerase activator inconsequential.  Indeed several clinicians have added things like TA-65 to their cancer patients’ routines to try and preserve the health of the immune system which universally takes a pounding from both cancer and cancer treatments.

This approach remains unstudied.

Here is another related observation.  First cancers beget second cancers. There is now growing evidence and interest in this linkage.  It appears that the shorter your telomeres are when you get your first cancer, the more likely you are to get a recurrence.  The problem is the timing of the studies has usually been after treatment so no one knows if the short telomeres were the result of “bad luck” as in you were born with shorter telomeres, or whether they were the result of the chemo and radiation these people got during treatment.

So we are left with a very basic notion you have heard before: Take care of your Telomeres!!!!

I offer a few options for you here:

TA-65

Telomere Edge Packs

Ultra 85 Fish Oil

I am one of those who feels very strongly about these associations and I am not willing to let a chance go by to influence them.

You must decide for yourself.

Best,

Dr Dave

The Ketogenic Diet Part 5 What I learned and what you should know!

The best way for me to cover all the stuff I want to tell you is in simple bullet point form and that is what I am going to do. But first let me say one thing that is critical: If you are a healthy person this diet is not going to pose any serious risks to you.  That said run it by your own personal health care professional before you try it. So let me start the bullet points with a few “safety issues”

• Ketosis is not Ketoacidosis. Ketosis is not dangerous. Your body can easily run on ketone bodies for a lot longer than you would think-possibly forever- as long as the nutritional makeup of your diet and the number of calories is sufficient to sustain you in healthy condition. Ketoacidosis happens to insulin dependent diabetics and in some less frequent cases to others. Most Type 2 diabetics will not have ketoacidosis but if you are a Type 2 Don’t try this without strict ongoing (like all day everyday) medical supervision from a qualified professional. Or at least get the blessing of yours before you do this!
• You have heard me mention “starvation range” when referring to ketones of 4 millimoles and higher. This is a somewhat arbitrary definition but these ranges require sever calorie restriction.  Your average Ketogenic Diet will not get you to these ranges and you may not need them to “treat” certain illnesses.  I chose to go Calorie Restricted to try to fill the 2 main recommendations of the CRKD for “cancer prevention” * low blood sugars and high ketones to starve cancer cells and preserve normal ones.
• Isn’t starvation unhealthy?  For short periods of times no. How short? Well 7 days is no big deal and if you look at the numbers I was only “there” for about 4 days out of the total.  Short term starvation may be just the thing to recycle sick mitochondria via autophagy (look it up!) and sick cells via apoptosis (you’ve heard me explain that one before too so look it up as well!).
• Isn’t hypoglycemia dangerous!!!  Answer: it depends how you got there.  If you took too much insulin or skipped a meal on your oral anti-diabetic meds you got there artificially and had no time to generate alternate fuels e.g. ketone bodies then it’s dangerous. If you got there the way I did with gradual calorie restriction and you are generally healthy you will not suffer any symptoms from hypoglycemia because your body will have plenty of ketones to run on alternatively. So using this diet to induce hypoglycemia is not dangerous provided you to it the way I did or follow some recommended guideline.

 

Ok now on to some cool observations:

*Fish oil Doses: Because there was so little food intake and specifically almost no Omega 6 fat intake there was no need to hit the fish oil hard. One to three caps every other day was plenty enough to keep the blood flowing easily for my finger stick checks of sugar and ketones.

*In Dr Seyfried’s book he recommends avoiding caffeine altogether and no strenuous exercise- just walking!  I did not obey those commands for various reasons but I can tell you the amount of coffee required to wake up when you are not eating anything goes way, way down.  A 6 ounce cup would be reheated several times throughout the day and still have some left when I went to bed.

You will notice my blood sugars were very low on some occasions and much closer to normal on others. Generally this is the effect of exercise which does several things that are actually shared by caffeine consumption.

First it bangs on your adrenal glands and stimulates them to release “adrenergic” (stimulant) chemicals. This drives up our blood sugar even when there is little or no sugar in your diet.

Initially this comes from stored liver glycogen but that lasts hours not days so the only other reasonable source is gluconeogenesis* This means your body is going to breakdown that hard earned muscle you put on in the gym to keep your blood sugar up!  Remember how I told you weight loss was not the primary goal of this experiment?  Well body building sure as heck wasn’t either!

So the further you go into ketosis the more muscle you are going to lose.

OK now some final observations:

• Mood and mental function: Although one or two people might disagree I did not notice any changes or moodiness at all.  I felt great and great about myself most of the time LOL! There were moments when my brain did not want to tackle any complex tasks or mental gymnastics but this was not all the time.  I found this to be more a function of high ketones than low blood sugar.
• The one kinda creepy aspect of the whole thing that really hit me during the hypoglycemia and big time ketosis periods was an eerie feeling that it was ok to keep starving.  Almost like they say freezing to death is not so bad. I just felt like I could keep this up forever. Fortunately my first spoon full of high carb sugary dried fruit “healthy” granola knocked me right back into reality LOL! Yum does my body love SUGAR!!!
• I “failed” to achieve the constant low blood sugars recommended because I refused to give up my exercise routines which would be considered “intense” under the circumstances.  This was personal choice and a matter of curiosity as well.  I did notice I tried a little bit sooner than usual and occasionally skipped the last set or cut a kilometer off a run but in general my performances were on par and on the last gym visit better than ever!
• Caffeine and fish oil can be reduced because they will be more effective in the face of reduced calorie intake and absorption will be faster. Do take your multi vites though  as you can start missing critical things quite fast.
• I needed to sleep more. Indeed I would say I slept a lot more soundly than usual easily grabbing 8-9 hours of uninterrupted sleep when possible versus my usual 7. Again reduced caffeine intake may have played a role but I am not a huge user to begin with.
• I was almost NEVER HUNGRY during this diet.  I am not 100% sure but I have to assume it is the magic of ketosis as an appetite suppressant.
• I was really surprised at how little my metabolic rate changed with this diet. Even using the accurate Body Gem I was running a resting metabolic rate of just over 2000 calories when in full blown ketosis and having lost almost 10 pounds. Bottom line ketones are an effective fuel for your body and can maintain your caloric needs just fine thank you!
• I learned how much of my own eating was “habitual” just used to eating at a certain time and making certain food choices which are actually generally healthy but often high in carbs- like certain fruits.
• I learned that for me personally Carbs Are the ENEMY. They stimulate my appetite and my cravings and they pack on calories fast. I learned this 4 years ago when I was full bore Paleo for the better part of a year but even this short stint brought that message home in a big way.
• I learned that it is actually very hard to keep your carb intake below 30 grams since even high protein foods have some carbs.
• Now here is the kicker: I learned it is easier for me not to eat all together than it is to manage carb intake and “eat healthy”.  I suspect like all habits the carb habit will take some time to kick and it will always be hovering around.  It is harder for me to control my carb intake by eating “just the right amount” than it is to avoid them altogether. I am still processing this fact!

My final thoughts: This was far easier than I thought but you definitely need to have the right mind set and discern “boredom eating” from true hunger. I was not ever able to get to water only even for 24 hours and that will be a challenge I undertake in 3 to 6 months when I do this all again. For me there would be a huge difference between even 300 calories and a little flavoring than nothing but water especially since metabolically I was able to achieve pretty much the same thing. I cannot imagine exercising with zero calorie intake over a couple of days and I am not willing to give up exercising even for a week at this point!

I think overall the effects of this little dietary experiment were totally positive and there will be some long lasting good things from learning about what makes me eat and how certain foods control my behaviors more than others!

As a final bit of good news, by the time you read this I will either have interviewed or be about to interview Dr Thomas Seyfried himself!  I can hardly wait!!!!

A thinner leaner more carb free Doc!

The Ketogenic Diet Part 4 The results and Why I Stopped Taking my Precious Fish Oil!!

Here are the specific numbers I obtained on the various days after the 2 day induction I described in Part 3 of this series.

I will be starting the numbering series with #1 which was the first day AFTER the induction. In other words this is the first day of the 8 day routine I described in the last blog, 200 to 400 calories and 10ish grams of carbs as my usual daily intake.

Please note you will see references in my notes to dropping body weight. While this was a pleasant side effect of this diet and I suspected it would have to happen it was by no means the main goal. The main goal was to experience CRKD and see how I tolerated it.

Abbreviations. FBS= fasting blood sugar. Ketones = Ketones in millimoles  Wt= how much I weighed at a specific time. BW=Body water as measured on a Tanita Iron man Scale for hydration status. BF= Body Fat on the same scale*  MR is the metabolic rate at the time via the same scale (although once for correlation I used a Body Gem device).

I used an Abbott Precision Xtra to measure my sugars and blood ketones.  I did not look at urinary ketones primarily because if you are truly using ketones for fuel you should not see a lot of them in your urine. Your body should be gobbling them up for food and not peeing them out. Then again at $5 a strip for blood ketones, I can see why people opt for urine testing!

You will notice that occasionally I added some numbers after “eating” exercising etc. in addition to the fasting dry weight numbers first thing in the morning.

You will also notice I left the original “notes” from my diary in some cases so you can see what I was feeling and thinking at the time.

Baseline prior to starting the full blown calorie restriction/ketosis 8 day portion:

Body weight 200.8  FBS 96 (normal is considered 80 to 100)

Day 1 197.8    FBS 74 neg ketones

 

Day 2 195 .5  FBS 68 Ketones 0.3 I did an evening Interval session on the Airdyne cycle consisting of 8 rounds of 3 minutes at 85 to 92% of max heart rate with 2 minute rest intervals in between. I did not feel fatigued during this session.

 

Day 3 water only until 330 PM Fasting AM  Dry wt 193.4  FBS 77  ketones positive at 1.1 mmol

At 3 PM calf fasciculations and minor cramps with exertion plan is to intake protein before night time work out. Noticing some tiredness but could easily be from poor sleep (unrelated!)  NO serious hunger pangs at this point interested to see how exercise goes.  I think I can hang in with this for a few more days with no problem.  I am encouraged by the wt loss though it has to be water!

7:30 PM Glucose 45 min post soup is 66

End of the day tally  total soups 3  total carbs 9 grams +almond milk total calories 270 plus almond milk.

 

Day 4 Plan water and coffee only  Dry wt 192  not sure why I have a feeling this is the body wt plateau and that further losses will be less  I would like to get to 188 and see how I look!  Today BWater is 55.9  BFat 13% on athlete’s measure  Post water lemon and coffee sugar is 71  ketones 0.8. Going to try gym next and possibly running!

Got back from gym  a bit shaky and mild light headedness Ketones down to 0.6  glucose is 87  This is shocking to me unless this is the result of exercise  I find it hard to believe that anything I have put in my body today could be used as non ketotic fuel!  Not hungry though plan to run next will do a 90 cal soup,

From 7 PM to 11 PM Wound up having a total of 3 soups over 4 hours!  Wt 192  Once I ate one it seemed like my appetite came back although I did run 5 K and go to the gym and lifted weights.

Calorie wise I am golden and should be lighter tomorrow morning.  I will be excited to be 190 and am guessing it will take until Tuesday to get in that range solidly although I have dropped 1.5 pounds or more each day I am not sure why I believe the weight to be mainly water and expect it to plateau.  More tired than usual earlier than usual but caffeine intake is lowered as well.

 

Day 5  Wt this am is 189.9 and it shows . My body has sucked down and in spite of having the strength in the gym yesterday the muscle mass is clearly less in my upper body.

FBS 47  Ketones 2.2 both the most extreme I have had so far but I feel fine not hungry  Cut down on fish oil and coffee doses because they are so effective now. I think this is kinda fun but I am a bit concerned about muscle mass and energy  so far I can’t complain,  I keep waiting for the s to hit the fan and it doesn’t …appetite is only a problem when I eat!!!  Tonight’s outing will be interesting. I think I have finally hit ketosis and this is where the real weight and fat loss is going to happen.

Body Water was clearly the lowest in a while 54.8% fat 14+ % again highest ever in recent thanks to Body Water being low. Fasciculations and near cramp in rt Calve.  Need to stay hydrated coffee is diuretic.

Note: after spending the entire night with my calves doing St Vitus’ Dance I discovered that plain old salt in the form of Bragg’s aminos solves the problem of cramps, fasciculations and dehydration (duh! Water follows salt). Laughing because all of my medical training has been to vilify salt consumption and focus on magnesium and potassium replacement with absolutely NO RELIEF!!! All I needed all these years of was salt and water.  Blood Pressure is 110/62 Heart rate a bit elevated at 62 resting.

Day 6  ran out of glucose strips but ketones are a new high of 3.3 so I think my glucose must be on the lower side.  Had to do some snow blowing fairly hard work and now I am hungry  going for soup and cider amino water.    Fingers are getting a bit sore on left hand from repeated finger sticks!

Day 7 Wts were up to 192.2 well hydrated at 9.6% body fat and 59.9% body water no cramps or fasciculations again thanks to the cumulative increase in salt intake,

Ketones are at starvation level  4.1  the highest ever.  I am not hungry  I think I will go to low carb diet slowly introducing with juice for 2 days when I am actually done here.  Clearly I would have to be super dehydrated to hit 185 lbs and the lack of being able to stay up etc is beginning to create a pressure situation with my work. I will be happy if I can get back to 189.  Last night I had a total of 3 soups again and this must be what is causing the water retention along with a significant amount of salt I had with the soups and Braggs aminos.  So I will have to back off those a bit, I want to work out today as well as time permits!  Interesting experiment.

Day 7 nighttime  post gym and 4 mile treadmill run  about 2 hours post  glucose 67 ( water lemon and small amount of aminos) handful of nuts and a few marys gone crackers  wt 191  bw 60%  bf 9.6%  BP 114/66 hr 69 post bath.

Day 8  wt 189.4  BW 58.8%  BF  10%  RMR 2060 via body gem   FBS 62  ketones 6.1 which would now be considered starvation range.  BP 110/61 Pulse 72 resting.

Started to get woozy tired and hungry late in the day. But I  Held it together until 2 AM call, I think I would have been fine had I slept through the night but such is the life of a doctor. After the call I was starving and ate several bowls of cereal and “lo carb” bread. I justified this by saying to myself I had gone a full day longer than I set out to when I started this.  Still it was a total carb pig out and I paid the price in GI distress. You do not want to reintroduce food this way!!!

Final official entry Day 9 wt 192.4 Body Fat 9%  BW 60%  did not run numbers  will go back on less restricted higher but not high carb diet with more calories. You would think that as long as I stay below RMR levels I should slowly continue to lose weight the right way. There are however the endless water shifts to contend with!

OK now the comment about Fish Oil.  I can honestly say that I skipped doses to about every other day and reduced the dose to between 1 and 3 capsules on days I took it.  This is the first time in 14 years I have missed this much and taken this little.

Why? Well if you have read any of my stuff about the Omega6/3 ratios or better yet attended my teleseminar you know the answer or can give it an educated guess.

I will cover this and much more in the next and final blog!

Doc

The Ketogenic Diet Part 3 How I did it

Ok first if you have not read the first 2 blogs please do so because a lot of info is covered that you need to know: Part 1 and Part 2.

Now here is what I did.

I actually went on the “diet” for a total of 10 days with 8 of them being severely calorie/carb restricted.

Day one was what most people would refer to as a “Juice Fast” that is I consumed mostly juice and water but I was not specifically looking at the total calories I consumed.  I was however looking to restrict Carbs somewhat so I used primarily low glycemic vegetable juice and cut it with about 25% fruit juice.  The total carb count of each 12 ounce serving was probably about 12 grams and I consumed 5 of those the first day.  Calorie wise this size of serving was probably about 180 calories so that alone puts me at 900 calories and 60 grams of carbs. I probably consumed another miscellaneous 100 calories and 10 grams of carbs that day for a grand total of 1000 calories and 70 grams of carbs.

So you have a reference point my height is 6’1 inch my walk around starting dry weight for this experiment was 201 pounds 57+% body water and a body fat of about 12% *

My resting metabolic rate via a Tanita** scale is 2250 ish calories a day which means that is the number of calories I theoretically need to maintain my body weight.  The one big thing that weight alone never really takes into account is water shifts and as we’ll see that becomes a huge factor when you diet and step on the scale.

To summarize Day 1. I was at least 50% below my RMR calorie requirement and I was in what would be considered moderate carb restriction (50 to 100 grams).

Day 2  This was also an “induction day” designed to ease me into the more severe carb and calorie restriction.  For this day I did exactly what I did on Day 1 but I replaced half of the juice with plain water to dilute it. Thus I wound up around 500 calories and 40 grams of carbs.  I was not really checking any numbers yet since the “diet” had not officially begun.

For the next 8 days I pretty much followed this script:

Calorie intake between 200 and 400 per day.  Almost all of this was supplied in the form of “Ideal Protein” soups of various flavors.  All of the soups I chose had 90 calories per serving and 3 grams of carbs.  Depending on the day I ate between 2 and 4 soups at typical intervals of 4 to 6 hours.

Additional calories were supplied by adding a tablespoon of almond milk to 4 ounces of regular coffee which I consumed once to twice daily.  I should note that Dr Seyfried recommends avoiding all caffeinated beverages because they can increase blood sugar. More on that in the next blog.

Doc

 

** Tanita is a registered brand name of a scale. I use the IronMan model but there are other makes and models.  The particular method of measuring values is known as electrical impedence and has some inherent inaccuracies. I will mention the Body Gem device which uses end expired CO2 to more directly measure metabolic rate at that particular moment.  Usually they correlate more closely than you might think so I rely on the Tanita on a daily basis with occasional correlation from the more expensive Body Gem.  Also if you look at those body fats and know anything about the subject you would be thinking, “What a stud Dr Dave must be!” Well sadly I have to be honest.  There are 2 settings on that scale and I have traditionally set it on “athlete” which means 10 hours of hard core exercise a week.  I probably roll in closer to 7 so you need to add about 5% to the body fat numbers. Be nice now and take into account my mid 50’s age and you will see that while I am not true stud material, my body composition is far better than average for my age J

The Ketogenic Diet Part 2 Some Whats and Whys

Ok today I am going to get into more detail and real experiences for you. I feel compelled to tell you that many other people including some famous and not so famous doctors have endorsed the Ketogenic Diet in its various forms.

The Calorie Restricted Ketogenic Diet is very specific in its application.  It is meant to be utilized as adjunct therapy for cancer.  The cancer preventative aspects of it are very sound scientifically and I will get into them again (I mentioned them in Part 1).  Above and beyond everything else I say here I need you to read and re read this at least 10X:

The words “cancer preventative” have not been tested or proven in human beings.  There is no evidence to suggest that this diet works as advertised and proving or disproving it would be virtually impossible since you would need lifelong studies of people living in a totally controlled environment with some doing the diet and others eating differently.

This is very much the same thing I say when people ask me, “Does TA-65 prolong life” or the corollary, “Does telomerase activation and telomere lengthening prolong life.”

The answer for ALL the same reasons is, “We are not likely to ever know for sure because the study that would PROVE it to everyone is impossible to do!”

So now that I told you that the “cancer preventative diet” is more or less an educated crap shot you might want to know why I tried it.

Refer back to Part 1 for some of the motivations but here is the nutshell:

It is 7 days of my life 2x a year.  If it works that is a small price to pay.  If it doesn’t well then I learned a ton and it didn’t kill me to skip eating for a week!

OK here is the “why it should work” part again.

Cancer cells are different than regular cells in several ways.  The most erudite voices of these hallmarks are Drs. Weinberg and Hanahan who note 6 major differences.  They also recently added metabolic defects after the fact in a tip of the hat to Dr Seyfried.

One of the ways that cancer cells are different is how they process energy. All cancers have this difference although the degree to which they exhibit it varies from tumor to tumor. The simplest way to explain it is cancer does not use oxygen or fuel sources the way regular cells do.

In particular cancer cells seem unable to metabolize fat well and instead prefer glucose (sugar).  This is the real reason sugar feeds cancer!* Of course there is a continuum and some cancers do use fats and not sugars but generally speaking the more “cancer like” cells behave and the nastier cancer behaviors they exhibit the more they are likely to prefer glucose and be slowed, stopped or even killed by glucose starvation.

The Calorie Restricted Ketogenic Diet (CRKD) is designed to do 2 things: It lowers blood sugar depriving cancer cells of their fuel and it feeds regular cells ketone bodies which allow them to thrive while the cancer cells are starved out. So it selectively targets cancer cells and preserves regular cells in a way that no chemo or radiation currently can! That is its sole purpose.

Now a word on other Ketogenic Diets.  It is not necessary to severely restrict calories to treat epilepsy or other conditions.  It is not necessary to severely restrict calories to induce ketogenesis/ketosis although I sincerely doubt the highly touted fat burning that supposedly occurs during these diets happens if you don’t reduce calories.

I am convinced that the “HCG” diet that is/was so popular works because of ketogenesis and severe calorie restriction, and has nothing to do with appetite suppression from HCG.

With any kind of SEVERE calorie restriction you can induce ketogenesis/ketosis even if you eat nothing but carbs. But you will not create the necessary low blood sugars you need to theoretically starve cancer cells. Your blood sugars will remain normal. Ketone bodies will appear in your blood anytime you go way below your needed calorie requirements. This is your body burning fat to supply the extra calories.

But before you go off and try this by eating nothing but a couple hundred calories in fruit and candy bars know this: The preferential use of ketones by your body depends not just on calories but the amount of glucose that is available from you food and other sources ( liver glycogen, gluconeogenesis etc).  Your body will make ketones and use some of them but as long as there is sugar there it will use that first.

If you really want to get the full benefits of this diet you should have BOTH ketosis and hypoglycemia.

Now hypoglycemia is an evil word.  It makes us tired light headed hungry irritable or worse it can kill some people right?!!!

Well maybe but the most interesting thing about the CRKD is that ketosis suppresses almost all of the effects of hypoglycemia including and especially the hunger.  This is personal experience talking. For most of the entire 7 day period I was NOT HUNGRY and if I got a little bit hungry at all simply filling my belly with a big glass of lemon water put a stop to it.

This complete lack of hunger is the big secret shocker I alluded to at the end of Part 1.  I expected to be miserably hungry.  I was totally wrong about that.

Ok now I want tell you how I actually did things.  At this point I have to admit failure at least to a degree. Dr Seyfried’s book talks about a 7 day water only fast in addition to other versions of the Ketogenic Diet.  It was my intention to do this because frankly it was the simplest thing to do.  You just don’t eat anything and drink water.  You don’t have to count calories because water has none. You don’t have to count carbs because water has none.  So Simple!

Well that proved impossible for me to do even for one of the 7 days. It was not the hunger so much as the need for a flavor or a texture other than plain water in my mouth. I will tell you that I don’t think I could do water only unless I were truly starving and had nothing else around me. That said I think my diet was a success because of the numbers I generated and of course all the things I learned.

And that will be where we pick up the next blog my friend!

Doc

Please note do not try this diet without medical supervision. If you are a Type 1 diabetic do not try this diet ever.  If you are Type 2 make sure you have strict medical supervision on a daily basis to do this and follow your blood sugars very carefully.

A Metabolic Interlude – The thinking behind the Ketogenic Diet

Long ago and far away a man named Otto Warburg hypothesized that cancer was a metabolic disease. In his view it was a defect in mitochondrial respiration. The politics of the world and of science eventually led to Warburg’s theories taking a back seat and a new theory of cancer took hold.

The strongest voice for reinstating and indeed advancing Warburg’s theories is a man named Thomas Seyfried who has recently released the book I mentioned in the first blog “Cancer as a Metabolic Disease”.

Dr Seyfried’s book is probably the most important piece of scientific reading I have done in the past 12 months. I still have many questions and am not 100% sure I believe every single thing written there but I am 100% convinced we are missing something in cancer therapy that this book addresses.

What is Dr Seyfried up against?

Plenty!

The genetic or genomic theory of cancer has been the predominant theory of cancer for the past 60 years so much so that all but for a few scientists Warburg became a forgotten footnote. Interestingly enough many of what you would call “peripheral health care practitioners” often invoked Warburg’s name to “prove” that Ozone therapy works for cancer.

As of this moment there is no evidence to support Ozone although there are the beginnings of glimmers of hope for hyperbaric therapy. *

To be clear what Warburg said was that Cancer cells could be specifically starved by attacking their nutrient source, not their oxygen source. There is scientific evidence to support cancer starvation using something called 2-deoxy glucose a chemical that mimics glucose and blocks its use in energy pathways. While the initial trials are not all successful, the work continues.

Warburg felt that the power houses of the cell called mitochondria had acquired a defect somehow. Examples of what might cause that defect are radiation, toxins and even in my opinion something like a skewed Omega6/3 ratio which promotes inflammation in the body.

This was to be the initial step in cancer formation. Clearly many of the cells would not survive this defect and would die and be removed by normal pathways of cellular trash hauling!

Those that did survive however would be subject to other changes that would allow them to use alternate forms of energy to generate the needed power of life while concomitantly and sequentially acquiring ongoing genomic instabilities and mutations that would allow them to escape normal growth controls among other things.

So the basic premise of this theory is, the respiratory (mitochondrial defect) comes first then the genetic stuff starts popping up.

Genetic theory of cancer proponents do not argue that almost every cancer seen has a metabolic defect that fits Warburg’s theories. They maintain however that the genes change first and downstream, way downstream from that, the mitochondrial defects occur.

In terms of what might be offered to cancer patients, the Warburg/Seyfried theories suggest a common point of cancer origin, a simple inexpensive therapy, at least as an adjunct to other forms, a potential for cancer prevention and quite frankly health improvement in non cancerous individuals, and a beacon of hope in the ever increasingly complex world of cancer therapy.

The genomic origins of cancer suggest: infinite complexity, the need for individual and personal treatment not for just each person but each tumor site, enormous expense and toxicity since even the best therapies still kill a fair number of healthy cells, and an onerous panel of side effects and misery to be endured by “survivors” of cancer. Of course this is also a gigantic source of revenue and business. I would like to say that means nothing but in my experience as an allopathic physician it is disgustingly front and center in this particular field.

Personally I am not convinced that either side is 100% correct and that either side has no merit.  The body is complex and cancer is a complex disease. Still it would be a human tragedy of enormous proportions if we did not further investigate the possibility of simple effective ways to augment what we are trying to do with cancer and cancer patients.

To all my colleagues out there- Do You really personally feel we are winning the war against cancer?

I don’t and this is why I feel so strongly that Dr Seyfried’s work needs as much attention as we can give it including research dollars.

If the Warburg/Seyfried hypothesis is correct, our own bodies may have the power to recycle sick and toxic mitochondria (autophagy, or more specifically mitophagy) and restore health to the cell before or even after cancerous transformation.

Is this not worth a sincere effort to find out!

Dr Dave

*Ironically intermittent Hypoxemia (severe lowering of arterial oxygen for short periods of time) has been used to induce mitophagy (mitochondrial recycling). This would be the exact opposite of hyperbaric oxygen therapy!

The Ketogenic Diet- My Personal Experience- The Epic Saga Part 1

Are Ketogenic Diets the next big trend?  We’ve seen gluten free and Paleo explode and be monetized in the Crossfit and Running communities so it is not an impossible thing!

It has always been interesting to me how diets come and diets go.  Most of the dietary trends we experience these days have their roots in our past, sometimes our distant past.

The Ketogenic diet was around as a therapeutic tool for epilepsy and other maladies since the 1920’s. Its forefather, extended fasting, has been around since as long as mankind.  Extended fasting was no doubt practiced by our Paleolithic ancestors out of necessity- they simply lacked food sources from time to time.  Somewhere after the agrarian age took hold and we began to cultivate grains some 10,000 years ago fasting took on religious connotations which are still practiced today.

Without launching into my usual diatribe about how I never liked all the stuff that gets hung onto certain practices by crazy people I will simply say I never understood the need for extended fasting other than for religious purposes in today’s society.

It has only been recently that there has been enough science to make me curious about the health benefits of this practice.  It always seemed that the wack jobs were the ones telling you how great it was too fast for long periods of time. That said, there are still plenty of wacky people who claim all kinds of non religious but “spiritual” purification effects of fasting.

If that is a wholisticky way of saying you recycle your mitochondria and get rid of sick cells then I get it.

As an objective science guy I can sorta kinda see why now that I have experienced what ketosis does to your mind and your thinking first hand, but my own personal reasons were scientific curiosity and of course my typical “I wanted to see if I could do it!” mentality.

OK, now some nuts and bolts.

In its simplest form the ketogenic diet is a diet that forces your body to use fat breakdown products known as ketone bodies as its primary fuel instead of carbohydrate derived sugars. It is by needs a very low carb diet because your body is super efficient at using even the teeny tiniest amounts of carbohydrates as its preferred fuel.

Important fact: Excess calories are stored as fat, no matter what food group they come from (carbs proteins or fats).

By getting rid of carbs as an easy source of energy and keeping your calories at least under control in terms of what your body actually needs to maintain its metabolism you will be able to dig into your fat stores. Thus the Ketogenic Diet has often been referred to as the “Fat Burning Diet”.

In its most famous form it became known as the “Atkin’s Diet” though the “classic” ketogenic diet is significantly different from Atkins.

So let’s talk about those classifications and how they apply.  By playing with the mix and sources of fats and proteins you get the various types of Ketogenic Diets- classic, Atkin’s modified Atkins and MCT oil (medium chain triglyceride) diets.

I am not going to dwell on any of these finer points because the Ketogenic Diet I chose was not any of them. But all Ketogenic Diets have a few things in common: they are relatively low in carbs and they all force your body to run on ketone bodies.

Starvation by Any Other Name!

I chose to do a severely Calorie Restricted Ketogenic diet. Some would call it a “modified starvation diet” which in point of fact is what it was.   Starvation in this case means that if I would have stayed on that particular diet I would have starved. Modified, to me anyway means, I did it by personal choice and I chose the sources for the paltry amounts of calories I was taking in.

You could call it Taking one on the chin (or in the Gut!) for Science

OK if you’ve gotten this far I am guessing you might be wondering why I would choose this most difficult of diets other than mild insanity.

Blame it all on Thomas Seyfried!

Thomas Seyfried has recently written a very compelling book on the origins of Cancer called “Cancer as a Metabolic Disease” in which he suggests a very low calorie Ketogenic Diet as therapy and here is the key word- prevention*- for cancer.

I loved this book on many levels. The biggest one is that it actually gave fairly specific “cancer prevention” recommendations* I read it once. Pulled a ton of reference articles and am reading it in detail.  Now here’s the thing. YOU need a strong and fairly recent background in biochemistry or this book will be above your pay grade. Not trying to insult you just being honest.

Also like most hard core science books it’s not inexpensive retailing for around $150 bucks. So be honest with yourself and your level of interest and specific education before you pony up here. For me personally it was probably the most impactful science book I have read in the past 12 months and I read a lot! Let me also say that I am not 100% convinced of everything said in this book but I am convinced it is of great merit for anyone interested in avoiding cancer and staying young as long as possible!

OK on to the meat of the matter.

Warburg revisited.

Dr Seyfried basically revisits the work of German Scientist Otto Warburg as it relates to cancer metabolism. Dr Seyfried not only believes Warburg was correct but has spent a significant amount of his career trying to prove it and improve upon Warburg’s theories. As such he flies directly in the face of the past 50 years of cancer research by stating that the genetic basis for cancer is misplaced and has wasted years and billions of dollars looking for a cure where one does not exist.*

I am just an anti-aging and regenerative medicine guy- not a cancer expert. But if Seyfried is correct then everything I’ve ever read and been taught about cancer is at best only partially correct.  I thought it might be prudent to find out more about this before I spend another bunch of money on cancer books!

The basic premise is that cancer need glucose to thrive and grow. Because of defects in its mitochondrial power houses, cancer cannot survive well or at all on ketone bodies. The combination of low calories and ketone bodies for a period of time should starve cancer cells while allowing normal healthy cells to do just fine.

On a cellular level it should also help select out sick mitochondrial power houses that were heading toward non cancerous fates as well.  The actual diseases associated with that situation are things like Chronic Fatigue, Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, Parkinson and Alzheimer Disease.  This by the way is only briefly alluded to in Dr Siegfried’s book.  Another book which is different in that it is awfully written and one I cannot recommend for anyone but the most hard core gluttons for punishment called “Acquired Mitochondropathy etc” delves into this.

OK I admit it.  I read stuff like this.  I pull hundreds of references from the bibliography sections of these and other books and read them down to the minutest details. Then and only then do I try them on myself. After that I tell you about it if it seems relevant to staying young and healthy.

Stem cells and TA-65 anyone!

After 270 plus pages of arguments, pathways, scientific dissertations, Dr Seyfried’s book meanders a bit to the topic of what he would recommend you and I do for “cancer prevention”.

My take on it was going on a water only diet for 7 days.

That will be the topic of the rest of this blog series including numbers, triumphs and failures.

To whet your appetite I will tell you this: yes I did lose some weight, and the rest of it was completely different than I would have anticipated.  I will also tell you I was completely wrong about something.

I should also tell you I did the unthinkable: I reduced my Fish Oil dose!!!!  Can you figure out why?

Stay tuned more to come! (Continued with:  The thinking behind the Ketogenic Diet)

Dr Dave

*This blog and Dr Seyfried’s book are not to be interpreted as cures, mitigations or treatments for anything. Always consult your own personal physician for medical advice including dietary recommendations. That said I would personally recommend you buy all the physicians you like a copy of “Cancer as a Metabolic Disease” especially if you know any oncologists!!!!

I also want to thank Dr Seyfried for having the balls to not mince words and say it like he sees it. Right or wrong a man of conviction is worth a listen!

TTAGGG You’re It! Stress, Disease and Telomere Length

The repeating sequence of the Telomere-TTAGGG has proven to be a gold mine for determining biologic age ( how old your body is acting!) and disease prognosis ( how bad you are likely to get something) as well as the effects of stress.

A recent study on the effects of racism on the telomere length of black men was the latest to show how social stress can affect longevity.  I have concerns about how the study was done but I think it makes sense to say that this kind of stress is detrimental to anyone’s health no matter what race or color.

This study builds on previous studies done in orphans who grew up with universally shorter telomeres than non orphans,  and the effects of stress on caregivers responsible for sick children.  All of these situations lead to more rapid aging and faster decline.  You can bet being sick in general can shorten your telomeres and your life.

This was shown by another study involving men between 50 and 75 who were admitted with ACS, acute coronary syndrome. Basically they were on their way to having a heart attack and no doubt some of them did.  The ones with the shortest telomeres did worse.

This study echoes the now famous Farezeneh Far, Blackburn study that showed that Omega 3 (fish oil) levels were protective of telomeres in heart disease.

So it seems everyone is linking just about everything bad that can happen to you to short telomeres and everything good to long telomeres.

It would be a good time for me to mention that other diseases of aging like Cancer and Alzheimer Disease ( yes they dropped the ‘s!) are also linked to telomere length in terms of incidence and severity.

Now there is still a lot of disagreement among researching scientists as to whether telomere loss is actually all that important in aging.  This pretty much depends on what their pet project is and where their grant money comes from.

I have a simple ( my PhD colleagues would say simplistic!) way of explaining this. My friend Maria Blasco did a study recently that showed that turning on telomerase extends life span in adult and old adult mice.  That was the end point of the study.  There are many other people out there looking at things like intracellular junk (lipofuscin) mitochondrial function, calorie restriction, sirtuin proteins and mTOR inhibitors.  None of these strategies have been shown by themselves to lengthen life although some of them seem to improve health.

I am certain that ALL of these things were improved by telomerase activation or the mice would not have lived longer.  You can’t live longer with declining mitochondria, abnormal proteins and increasing intracellular junk.  It’s simply not possible.  But because these things were not specifically measured common sense takes a back seat to scientific skepticism.

Here’s the thing: They would rather remain skeptical than investigate these questions probably because their grand money does not include answering these questions.  It does involve protecting their source of income for their pet project however.

Here’s another thing: as I said above Telomerase Activation seems to be the only current feasible way to extend life in mammals.  The folks spending time on all that other stuff have been unable to demonstrate increased longevity AND healthspan.

Want it to be even more simple?

I will quote that bastion of American Health who brought us the great Dr Oz.

Yes, I am talking about Oprah who said “I want long telomeres!” She should be on TA-65!

You probably should too!

I am entering year 5 with nothing but positive improvements in both telomere length and % of short telomeres. Both are going the right way for decreasing biologic age.

What is youth worth to you?

Doc

PS what I have said here is especially important if YOU are under constant or severe stress, get sick a lot or have a family history of one of those nasty diseases above!

New Year’s Resolution vs. New Year’s Revelation

Today’s departure from the usual was sparked  by a question sent in by one of Dr Dave’s Best newsletter readers.  By the way if you are not one of them you should be since it is yet another way I keep my people up to date on all things anti-aging along with my myth busting and of course the latest developments.

The question was an interesting and probing one:  “Dr Dave what are YOUR New Year’s Resolutions, and how are you doing with them?”

At first I though, “That’s a bit forward! Isn’t it!”  but then I realized I did have some important info to share with you in that regard.

I have continued to simplify my life and I encourage you to do so.  Each year I hone in on what is most important in my life.

I have narrowed it down to 3 major things and almost all of my resolutions have to do with those things.

They are:
#1 My Health  I hope its not too big of a surprise that my own health is paramount to just about everything else I do. I know of some very famous people in my field both internet types and non internet types who are just flat out sick.  They don’t look happy and they certainly don’t look healthy, no matter how many millions of readers they have.  It always struck me as strange that a person can’t look at someone and say, “Wow they can’t be practicing what they preach or if they are its the wrong stuff!”
In my book if you walk the walk you look great feel great and are a beacon for people who are trying to stay young for as long as possible.  And a wonderful by product of that is you are happy most of the time and people know it!

I think my hero in that department was Jack La Lane!

Now in terms of simplifying how I look at my health my overall approach has been and is: do what works and always keep the long exciting and active future you have in mind as the end goal.

A few of the modifications on previous habits are: Get leaner and eat cleaner even on the road. Exercise MORE when traveling not less.  And a very simple one: eat less calories every day.

#2 Take care of the people I love and those who love me.  Now is a good time for me to remind you: I do what I do for myself and the ones I love. Now as self centered as that may sound frankly its the kind of integrity you should expect from anyone in my position. That is also the way I always practiced medicine. If I would not want me for a doctor or me taking care of my mom then I do not belong in the profession. That attitude has carried over to:

#3 My business: I once spent a little time with one of the top internet guru docs on the planet. Everything I heard was about money and business.  Everything.  Everything that was written and sent to that list was designed to get more business.  Now I admire a certain degree of business savvy but when people are actually doing what you tell them to and spending their hard earned dollars on your stuff I think they would like to know what you personally do and take and how you can help them before they know you are always helping yourself independent of how it may truly affect them.

On occasion that means saying you disagree with the party line on something. Now as I have learned many times over, that upsets people and actually negatively affects your business.  But there are truth seekers out there who are genuinely looking for answers and are willing to at least listen to someone who speaks their truth, backs it up and lives it.

I am not sure if you follow me on Facebook at all but that venue is where I SHOW what I am doing including all the “personal Guinea pig stuff” I am vetting for you. Once again it helps me and keeps me on the cutting edge of my personal space in the world: anti-aging.
It also helps you because you find out about it first from someone who has “been there and done that”. In the next few weeks I will be starting an experiment on myself with 2 other brave souls that I hope will be a revelation.

The resolution behind it was this: Speed up the process of new discoveries in human anti-aging medicine.

Another revelation I have had: my business is important to me because it is me. It feeds #2 above and of course #1 every single day.

Now I want to share a personal Revelation with you that has helped me immensely with all of the above because it has allowed me to find guidance from places far bigger and wiser than I.

Here it is: Let Go of Outcomes! Ask for what you want with faith and positive expectation and then let it go.  You will be shown the way. In the process you will be doing something else magical: Making Space. By quieting your mind and not trying to force, will and control everything you will have space to enjoy the moment and see and hear things around you that will help you make all of your Resolutions come true, and much much more.

If you need help with intuition and creativity or even just more brain power here is my secret It is not the ONLY reason I get some much done, but it is a huge help.

And everyone needs some of that.

What have you done so far and what are you going to do?
I hope its everything and more that you want to do.

Best, Dr Dave

New Cancer Pathway Involves Telomeres

Drum roll and trumpets please!  A new cancer causing pathway has been found. It involves telomeres of course.

I bring it to your attention though, not for what it has shown us, but for how it its marketed. You see even scientists know they stand a better chance of getting recognition if they blow the trumpets and role the drums.  That means press releases and social media nonsense that is written by non scientists.

Now don’t misunderstand me. I give them the same “get out of jail pass” I often claim: “I didn’t make this world, I just live in it!”

Still as your source of the truth about all things telomere related, especially when it comes to your health and your understanding, I consider it my calling in life to make sure you are not blown all over the map by media hype and internet nonsense.

So let’s go over a few facts:

1)      Fact one: Telomerase does NOT CAUSE CANCER. Every time I write this I hope it is my last but that is never the case it seems.  85% of human cancers turn on telomerase somewhere in the process of becoming cancer. In the one or two cases we are clear on its actually one of the last steps ( villous adenoma to colon cancer) but cancer genetics are a diverse thing and no one knows the exact sequence that mutations happen in all cancers. There is a growing contingent of people out there who feel that contrary to 65 years of research, cancer may not even be a genetic disease. When telomerase is expressed in cancer it can be a) mutated, b) amplified c) transposed d) any other genetic abnormality that can lead to over expression! The key is to understand that things happen to cause cancer long before telomerase expression shows up to immortalize the cells, and that those things lead to the loss of normal control of many genes and their end products. Telomerase over expression does not seem to cause cancer by itself in the absence of other major changes.

2)      Telomerase is required for ultra long longevity and gene integrity in cells. Two of the best examples are germ cells (the things that become sperm and eggs) where there is a large amount of telomerase expression and stem cells where there is less. The later fact is probably one of the main reasons stem cells age albeit at a slower rate than the rest of our cells.

3)      There are normal “cell cycle check point” mechanisms that have been known for some time now that need to be bypassed in order for cancer to take hold.

4)      Longer telomeres are associated with a cleaner genome (fewer mutations) cleaner mitochondrial cell powerhouses (fewer mutations better function and better ability to make new mitochondria) and a lower and less sever incidence of cancer.

5)      While most cancers turn on telomerase there is another way for cancer cells to lengthen their telomeres and survive that does not involve telomerase.  This generally is reserved for the badest of the bad in terms of genetic instability (actually if I am being scientifically correct its “genomic instability” but you know what I mean!). This mechanism is called ALT.

6)      The ability to divide endlessly either using telomerase or ALT is one of the hallmarks of human cancer.

That brings me to the “latest findings”.

One Dr Jan Karlseder of the Salk institute discovered one of the mechanisms behind the ALT method of lengthening telomeres. Dr Karlseder found a protein called ASF-1 that drops down to zero and triggers cells in culture to use the ALT mechanism to lengthen their telomeres.

All well and good but here are my gripes.

Cancers in real life have measurable levels of that protein. It does not drop to zero in ALT driven cancers.

The super irritating insinuation that I see in all such articles “This will help us develop drugs to fight cancer”  is present here. Cancer drugs are expensive, Cancer drugs are deadly, Cancer drugs divert research away from, gasp, cancer prevention which no scientists is willing to admit they believe in. And there is no money in prevention. If you think this is a joke mark my words a cancer preventative treatment that is not a patentable drug will not be released until a drug company owns it. At least not over their dead bodies. That said most of the quacks who claim to have cured cancer and have been jailed for such statements actually do belong there!

Next, the press release is entitled “Cancer Causing Pathway Explained”.

Now I bet this was the sole concoction of the press release company. I do not think that such smart scientists would allow their discovery to be called named this way. The ALT pathway does not cause cancer, it is probably one of the last or later pieces in the puzzle.  By naming it this way they are propogating the myth that telomeres are responsible for cancer.

Next there is the usual talk of “balancing cell aging with risk of cancer” . This implies that we get old and die to prevent cancer from killing us. After I am done with the LOL ing I want to remind everyone that old cells, senescent cells seem to excrete inflammatory and yes cancer causing signals. For this reason it seems nonsensical to propose that getting old protects us from cancer. Especially when cancer is a disease of aging in 95% of all cases!

Summing it up, I would say it this way: We are barking up the wrong tree. Telomerase and telomere lengthening are cancer protective under normal circumstances. Guys you have to keep looking for the chicken that is laying the egg not examining the ingredients in the omelet!   This is also the reason I am intrigued if not convinced of the metabolic cause/component of cancer.  The genetic stuff leads nowhere but to an ever increasingly large ‘room full of pathways’ that has no end. Great for researchers and crappy for people who have or want to prevent getting cancer.

In 12+ years of research I can tell you two things with surety. Walk around with “high” omega 3 levels and keep your telomeres long anyway you can.

There are quite a number of famous scientists who are doing just that even though they will not say it in front of their peers for fear of ridicule. Me? I don’t care who ridicules me. I refuse to sit on my ass and get old when there are real answers to slowing and eventually stopping the process.

I will make this prediction. Classic science just like classic medicine will not make major breakthroughs in aging and health span. They will trumpet their findings just like the article above but the real breakthroughs will come from people who are actively seeking the answers and doing something about it every day .

That is you and me my friend!

Best, Dr Dave

Why We Get Fat and the World’s Best Diet

I am taking a short break and stepping off my telomere / fish oil soap box to revisit a topic that in the past was a big favorite: diet and obesity.

As I mentioned in my last blog my descent and resurrection from obesity is graphically detailed on the Ultra Strength Fat Furnace page.

My own journey to getting fat is actually pretty typical at least in terms of reasons why.

Those reasons are: significant and sudden decrease in activity, complete abandonment of any dietary restrictions in terms of my food choices, and finally lack of concern over how many calories I took in.  Briefly this was supposed to be an experiment to prove that Ultra Strength Fat Furnace worked and sped up weight loss.  I was going to gain 15 pounds and then hit the brakes and reverse it in a few weeks by reinstating my life style and adding the supplement I had created. I stopped all of my supplements during this time and man was it easy to pack on the pounds. The unplanned part happened when I developed and acute appendicitis and added 6 more weeks of inactivity and another 35 pounds to the weight loss tally.

A few months and 50 pounds less later I learned a couple of very important things I want to share with you about why we get fat and the world’s best diet to lose that fat.

The specific reasons I gave you above are the reason most people get fat. Once again they are:

• Too many calories in.
• Too few calories out.
• Not enough physical activity.
• The wrong choices of food.

The first 3 are undeniable and pretty much everybody knows this.  But the last one is really a sticking point.

Our diets are loaded with inflammatory food choices. By that I mean foods that tilt the balance of our immune system towards inflammation and cause havoc over time with our health.  But they also set up a kind of chain reaction where inflammation begets more inflammation and now you have a cycle that reinforces itself.  That is much harder to do once that cycle is established than it is to nip it in the bud.

At the same time our diets are loaded with carbs and sugar. Notice I am not distinguishing between simple and complex carbs anymore.  I am saying ALL carbs. Now I can hear the dieticians in the audience grumbling about my obvious “mistake” and oversight but I am very deliberate.

I think the best diet for rapid weight loss and overall health is a diet (e.g. reduced calories!) that leads to ketosis in your body.  You can call it a ketogenic diet if you like.  I think the biggest benefits are seen by the combination of ketosis and dietary energy reduction (DER). Some people would call that “calorie restriction” but I do not want to invoke all the baggage that comes with that term.  My recent sojourn to Wiaken Ranch in Joseph Oregon with OMD Dr Laurel Sander has reinforced that.  Seven days of juice (again some people would call that a “juice fast” and a daily calorie intake of about 50% my usual was easy to maintain and resulted in rapid weight loss of about 7 pounds. And it has stayed off because my appetite has stayed under control.

So if you like Carbs are the enemy. Simple carbs much more so than complex and fruits much more so than vegetables and sugared fruits and juices (ever wonder how they get cranberries to taste sweet?!).  In a month or so I will tackle a seven day water fast and let you know how that goes.

Anything that rapidly cranks up your insulin levels is a bad thing for your weight and your health. Be particularly wary of the “whole grain” agenda. There are a ton of reasons why I am not a grain fan but for our purposes today it’s because they tend to be loaded with calories even in small portions.

The things I really want to stress here are the following: Sugar is indeed addictive and sugary food choices including sweet fruits can sabotage your appetite control. You will get hungry by eating carbs in excess of 20 or so grams a day and this will make dieting miserable, exhausting and most likely, a failure.

I have always found that by day 3 or so of a really low carb ketogenic diet I have a lot of energy even with DER.

So is this the best diet in the world?  Just like my last blog the answer is “It depends”.

I think it is the best one to induce fairly rapid weight loss and long term recognition of your eating “habits”. Eating by routine instead of hunger fuels most of our “waist lines”. It will also teach you how sneaky and pervasive sugar and carbs that easily go to sugar are at getting you to lose control of food choices, portion control and your will power. Carbs and insulin are the enemy and sugars are far more addictive for some of us than we realize.

Finally it will teach you a huge lesson: most of us eat too much! Plain and simple.*

With those lessons you will gain insight into your body and how it works that will help you in ways you never dreamed of and give you a new sense of control over your life.

But as a long term diet I think its too easy to get into vitamin deficiencies if you are not careful. If you decide to do this make sure you take your supplements .

If it all seems too much for you than just go here and make it much easier .

Either way its time to take control of your weight and your life. Let’s make 2014 that year!

Doc

*I am referring to middle aged adults here because that is the “most of us” that is interested in staying younger. On a side note 10 years ago I carried 235 lbs of mostly muscle around. Nowadays its more like 195 with a similar body composition. I think being leaner as you age is just much healthier. And it will keep you from being “one of the many”. When I walk around in the company of guys my age with the huge guts, crappy posture and fat faces I feel like one of us is not human!

Aerobic versus Intervals – The Best kind of Exercise Revisited

For the past decade I have intermittently written about the effects of exercise on health and body composition (primarily weight loss). My own descent and resurrection from Obesity is well detailed on the Ultra Strength Fat Furnace page in graphic fashion. At that time I also obtained my CPT ( personal Trainer) certificate and began what would amount to a biannual sojourn to Boca Raton and the Institute of Human Performance to visit then Guru now Guru and dear friend Juan Carlos Santana.

I have learned an awful lot from Carlos and it has spurred my continued study of Exercise Physiology, something I obtained a Masters Degree in many years ago.

Along with over a decade of medical practice and another decade in supplement design all interspersed with tons of public speaking teaching normal people and doctors, I distilled one of the most common questions I get asked about exercise into the title of this blog.

“Doc what is the best kind of exercise?!”  I must get asked that 100 times a year from all kinds of people in all kinds of places.  I often give them JC’s answer: The best exercise is the one YOU do!

While this may sound like I am running from the issue it is not. JC has captured the central conundrum of exercise- We can’t get people to do enough of it regularly! Now that is a whole ‘nother lecture so I’ll save that and give my next most common answer:

It depends.

It depends very much on what you want. So then I have to go down that garden pathway with the person and find out what level of motivation, starting fitness and health and realistically what they are likely to stick with.

No mean feat.

The answer I most commonly get is, “Doc I want to lose this excess body fat!  But I also want to have a great body be healthy and still feel attractive. I want fat loss strength and flexibility. I want to be sexy and have a high level of endurance. I want a six pack (guys) and a nice butt (girls). I don’t want to be muscle bound but I want to have muscles. I want to get rid of this belly (guys) and the muffin top (girls).  Oh yeah and I don’t want to be tired all the time. I don’t want to spend much money or invest much time either because I am super busy with all the other stuff that I have somehow decided is far more important than my health. I still need to watch my favorite TV shows and eat out 5 times a week at least. By the way will I have to diet to get to where I want? I hope not. Can’t I just exercise 20 minutes 3x a week like it says on http://www.miraclebodyinfiveminutesaday.com ?” (Not a real link!)

In other words they want everything.

Not once has anyone ever said, “I want to do the exercise that helps me age most gracefully!” And rarely does anyone say “I want to learn to move better.”

There was this guy named Hans Seyle back in the 1930’s who coined the term adaptation as it applies to the body’s response to exercise. If you keep his principle of adaptation in mind you will understand the body becomes a mirror of the stimulus you give it. Power lifters get powerful and strong. They don’t always look that aesthetically pleasing.  Body builders get less strong significantly bigger (steroids aside) and much more aesthetically pleasing as long as they don’t go overboard. Runners tend to get scrawny in weak looking but they can go forever. And so on and so forth. Ultimately and this is just my opinion Gymnasts for men and skaters for women have the best overall aesthetically pleasing looks.

The point is you become a mirror of the kind of stimulus you give your body so chose wisely and don’t expect running to make you big by itself or power lifting to make you ultra lean by itself.

When I wrote my portion of our book “The Immortality Edge” I had had a lot of exposure to people who advocated Sprint or High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT).Two of the biggest pioneers were Matt Furey and Phil Campbell in that order and were among the first to fuel the fires of what would become the modern HIIT craze.

In our book we wrote that HIIT was the most efficient way to get in shape, maintain health and body weight. We also wrote about its effects on telomere length which is actually shared by Long Slow Distance (LSD).

I chose HIIT type training for the following reasons:

1)      It required only 30 min or so to get a great workout

2)      It can be done as almost zero impact in the pool

3)      It seems to be the fastest way to increase your cardiovascular fitness rapidly at least to a point.

4)      There is less of a tendency to stimulate the monstrous appetite that seems to follow really Long LSD exercise

5)      Bottom line this is a very efficient way to get in shape

6)      The contribution of EPOC Excess Post Exercise Oxygen Consumption was supposed to be enough to add hundreds of calories to the overall calorie burn well beyond the time spent exercising. I had read some early studies that noted up to 600 calories more above and beyond whatever was burned during the exercise bout itself.

So EPOC became the buzz word for fat loss, sexy body composition and spiritual transformation and EPOC became the ‘secret’ to all good things that was defended by its faithful legion.But during my observations of how this type training affected my body I found I did not agree with the last point..  As per my usual approach of, “Gee this is pretty important since the whole premise is built on it. If I can I need to be sure that it is true or not true”, I found a simple way to do some research.

I found a device that accurately measures RMR and MR under other circumstances several years ago called Body Gem.  I initially used this device to evaluate 2 things:  The effects of exercise on me and a few willing “guinea pigs”, and the effects of what was then new, Ultra Strength Fat Furnace to the mix.

What I found was I did not lose weight on interval training alone. In addition I did not have the “getting ripped effect” where body composition changed and body fat melted off me*. This was important because advocates of HIIT defended and marketed both of things like crazy.  Moreover I did not find the Effect of EPOC to be all that earth shattering.  Even with Tabata type intervals I only burned around 220 calories above resting and in me at least the level of increased metabolism lasted far less than the 24 to 36 hours that were originally touted. If you think about it in terms of weight loss and body composition you would want more calories burned than you take in and you would somehow like to shunt those calories away from muscle and into fat. Both were purported benefits of HIIT.

When I added the Ultra Strength Fat Furnace I was able to document on myself and several others around about 600 calories total excess burned (including the 200 from exercise) and see the effect lasting almost a full 24 hours although the level of burn fell off progressively from the time of exercise.

What I ultimately concluded was:

1)      In a well trained middle aged man trying to lose weight HIIT alone when adjusted for the progressive loss of effect over several hours probably was good for 100 calories of extra energy burned. My volunteers (all 4 of them!) had similar results.

2)      By adding a thermogenic supplement and adjusting for progressive loss of effect over time (although a 2 or 3X a day dose routine mitigated this somewhat) I could account for about 400 calories more. Again this is above and beyond the calorie burn of the HIIT session which was usually a 30 minute session with 90 to 92% heart rate for 30 second intervals repeated 8 times. That accounted for another 250 calories or so.

3)      HIIT alone was not going to help with weight loss although it was effective for weight maintenance. Adding a thermogenic definitely made weight loss easier and rather dramatic because 600 calories extra everyday for 6 weeks adds up to serious weight loss!

4)      EPOC was at least in me way overestimated even when different lengths and times of intervals were used. I started with traditional Tabata type intervals on a treadmill or stationary bike at first.

5)      To get the kind of fitness level and body I wanted I had to use more or less standard resistance training and some LSD as well. If the LSD could integrate some intervals (brutally hard to do!) it had even more benefit!

6)      Contrary to what the Gurus had written, LSD also had some EPOC, in some cases more than HIIT!

It turns out that several years after my little personal study several bona fide scientific studies were done and they showed the following.

The maximum EPOC from HIIT training was only 10% of the actual total calorie burn, was long gone after less than 6 hours, maxed out at 220 Cal which again was a spot measurement and fell of the further you went out from the actual exercise. It was long gone the same day and lasted nowhere near the purported 24 hours.

Stated another way HIIT calories come mainly from the actual bout of exercise not the EPOC- something I found to be true years earlier in my own case.

Now here is the thing. I still stand our recommendations in the Immortality Edge because HIIT may actually work better for out of shape people to get them in shape than any other type of exercise.  It certainly works faster!  Depending on what type of hit you do you will get some different results. When I was doing my personal study I eventually settled on 4 minute intervals at 85% heart rate max ( and this was controlled by using a HR monitor) with anywhere from 1 to 3 minutes recovery depending on where my fitness level was.  Repeats were 6 to 8 and I did these on a Schwinn Airdyne cycle which remains my favorite low impact device.  I did my Tabata’s (30 seconds on full and 30 to 60 seconds off) with a flotation vest in deep water at the pool.

When you do the longer lower intensity intervals it has been shown to improve your heart rate and “cardio” conditioning more than the really short super high intensity ones which develop explosive strength more.  As you go longer the contribution of aerobic (burning oxygen) metabolism goes up so this makes sense.

All HIIT had very positive benefits on metabolic parameters like insulin; blood lipids etc so from a health perspective it seems you can get the same benefits as LSD in less time.

What did I learn?

HIIT is very efficient and very useful. It is a great way to “get” in shape or get to the next level of fitness.  It has great metabolic effects. It is not, at least for me and my co-crazies, a way of losing weight or changing body composition by itself. It requires support from other forms of exercise including LSD.

So HIIT is slowly coming down off its high horse and LSD is resuming its rightful place among exercise.  This upsets a lot of people.  I can recall a Gynecologist publically ridiculing me and humiliating himself by angrily telling me I was FOS when I said we are always in the fat burning zone except when we are doing HIIT! He insisted incorrectly that you only burn fat when you hit 90% of your Heart Rate and that this was the “Fat Burning Zone”. This is what happens when people get their information from the internet and believe people who “look” credible but are themselves FOS.

HIIT burns more fat after in its EPOC phase but as we see that was way over estimated. During your HIIT session you are actually using the glycolytic (sugar burning lactate producing) pathways. The angry Gynecologist had done something I see all to commonly these days. He let an internet site or Guru make him forget his education in favor of popular public opinion. Destroying a myth is not a great way to win friends and influence people!

And what happened to all the HIIT gurus?  They are still out there quoting the old studies done with old inaccurate methodology and study design.  The courses and books touting “Get Ripped”  “Afterburn” and “Destroying the Fat Loss Dogma” are still referenced as gospel truth. The information is still quoted as factual, and their devoted legions are still angrily lashing out at me.  I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if I get some comments on this blog that way even though I have had very positive things to say about HIIT.

In the meantime I still stand by my original answer to the question, “Doc what is the best form of exercise?”

It depends.

All the Best, Dr Dave

*There are several well known videos and highly respected trainers who have shown wonderful transformations in their athletes by adding HIIT training and decreasing other forms of training during this time. Tabata the Japanese speed skating coach had great results with his speed skaters in competition and noted remarkable increases in their aerobic capacity. Here’s the thing. These people were all Olympic level athletes. They were already at a super human level of fitness and probably needed one tweak to their training to change their outcomes. That tweak was the metabolic boost given by HIIT but it was contingent on a couple of things: They were quite YOUNG like under 30. They were already in tremendous shape and could tolerate maximal or even “supra” maximal stimulus without whining or getting injured. Their training environment and nutrition were strictly controlled and they did not do other things like try to earn a living. And I guarantee you they did a ton of other stuff besides just HIIT, including some LSD and weight training.

When these principles were applied to even the average active young person the results were less stellar. In the middle aged about to get sick group, you know the 50 something fat  metabolic early diabetic men, the calorie burns were flat out disappointing even though they were at 85% max heart rate. They stayed kinda fat middle aged and frumpy!  But, they got healthier in a big way quick. In other words it not only depends on what YOU want but WHERE you are starting from and how far you can actually go!

References: Total daily energy expenditure is increased following a single bout of sprint interval training

Physiol Rep. 2013 October; 1(5): e00131.

Application of the Speed-Duration Relationship to Normalize the Intensity of High-Intensity Interval Training

PLoS One. 2013; 8(11): e76420.

Sports Med. 2003;33(14):1037-60.

Effect of exercise intensity, duration and mode on post-exercise oxygen consumption.

Børsheim E, Bahr R.

Krill better than fish oil- more chicanery

A recent a study published in the journal Lipids in Health and Disease my favorite topic was examined. That topic you may have guessed is the ratio of Omega 6 inflammatory fats versus Omega 3 anti-inflammatory ratio. I have harped on and on about this for many years because it is the most important measure of how YOU are doing with your fish oil consumption. In my recent teleseminar I detailed the results of over 150 tests that I did. Like I have told you before I do my own research on stuff I think is important. I don’t just rely on internet nonsense or marketing hype which sadly is what most of it is.

Which brings me to the next point.

There is a battle going on for market share in Omega 3’s. This is not surprising considering their importance of Omega 3’s.
Here are the combatants.

Omega 3 fish oil manufacturers which include Ethyl ester “natural triglyceride” fish oil which is pretty much straight out of the fish, and finally the so called re-triglycerided “fish oil”  and a real anomaly since this molecule does not exist in nature at all.

Today I want to focus on krill and debunking some of the marketing nonsense and hype that goes on.

Please note this is only a short list of the most frequently used BS arguments on the internet. I am not against competition I am against deceptive tactics and as you will see there are plenty.

Here are they typical nonsense internet claims you will here and the truth

1) Krill is better than fish oil. The latest study shows an improved Omega 6/3 ratio with krill over fish oil. In the past Acker Biomarine the largest krill manufacturer on the planet funded a similar study. That study also showed an improved absorption on a mg per mg basis with no difference in clinical outcomes. Interestingly enough the folks at Acker were slick enough to pick a really crappy cod liver oil with only about 30% Omega 3 content. And they still could not say it was better. The most recent study Lipids Health Dis 12:178, 2013 was even more clever. Somewhere somehow they found a “fish oil” that was more omega 6 than omega 3. That was what they used for comparison, something that was guaranteed to show a positive result. Since this kind of fish oil had to be deliberately sought out and does not represent even typically available commercial fish oil I can only conclude this was deliberate chicanery meant to deceive people who do not know any better. How about this. I invite the authors to redo the study with my Ultra 85 I will donate as much as they need but they HAVE to publish the results. I will be waiting! I should also point out another thing. Last April there was a fatal explosion at the Neptune Krill plant in Canada. Hexane a volatile organic solvent that has been linked to cancer caused the explosion. Since Neptune makes only Krill I have to wonder what they use the Hexane for! I can only guess this is part of their extraction process. You decide whether this sounds like something you want to be exposed to!

2) The integration of krill into membranes is better than fish oil because it’s a phospholipid and mimics the membrane form more closely than any form of fish oil. This is actually true on a mg per mg basis. But they leave out the fact that commercial krill preparations only contain a total of around 300 mg of Omega 3 per capsule. They also leave out the fact that membrane bound Omega 3 still has to go to single chain EPA and DHA to be used for anything other than membrane activity. While membrane bound fatty acids are structurally important in ALL membranes including cell wall mitochondria and nuclear membranes. But anything else and believe me there is lots else (cytokines Resolvins Protectins all kinds of immune and hormonal modulators) all goes through single chain EPA and DHA forms. Ethyl esters are the closest format to that. Closer than 2 tailed phospholipids and much closer than the 3 tailed triglyceride forms.

3) Krill is pure because it’s small and comes from the pure Antarctic waters. What a load of BS that is. The krill I tested independently had lots of toxins and pollutants including 50X the amount of arsenic allowed in drinking water. Wanna guess which famous internet guru that everyone things so highly of is selling it? In addition the statement is true only if you look at single isolated organisms. Krill is tiny and it is at the bottom of the food chain. So its true it cannot accumulate much pollution. But when you concentrate hundreds of thousands or millions even to make one bottle then a little gets magnified and becomes a lot. Do you really think the people making these statements don’t know that?!

4) Fish is non sustainable therefore we should use krill. The Truth: Several krill fishing areas have been shut down because of eco system imbalances. Fish consumption is however stable now and for the foreseeable future due to appropriate fish and aquatic husbandry. In addition attempts to modify the food chain have led to such great things as Frankenfish the genetically modified salmon that grow huge and outcompete their wild type neighbors while providing more Omega 3 per pound. And my favorite GMO- plants modified to produce human form Omega 3’s, now looming on the horizon. Krill is certainly no more sustainable than fish and is more likely to affect more species because it is so low on the food chain.

5) Please show me one population based study on krill. I want that because the tiny little studies that are funded by Acker and Neptune completely lack the statistical power needed to draw any real conclusions and the conclusions they draw are “equivalence” not superiority in spite of the marketing hype. Truth: There is not one population of humans on the planet that lives on krill.

6) Ethyl ester fish oil is poorly absorbed. The truth is it is not “poorly” absorbed it is “slowly” absorbed so if you fiddle with your studies in the right way and check the absorption times at one hour you will see a difference. But the largest series of studies done with Ethyl Ester fish oil was called GISSI and have many times shown all the benefits these studies showed. They researchers there deliberately chose Ethyl Ester fish oil for it’s slower absorption curve for a reason. That reason is most people take their fish oil in the morning after they wake up. Most heart attacks statistically happen earlier in the morning. The slow steady 24 hour absorption curve of Ethyl ester fish oil covers the people better because it is still around at the time they need it most, 20 to 22 hours later! The results were unequivocal and included a 28% reduction in sudden death, 35% reduction in all cause mortality and similar reductions in cardiovascular and cerebrovascular deaths.

7) Here is what a recent review of fish oil formats concluded: “While the results with fish and fish oils have been not as clear cut, the data generated with the purified ethyl ester forms of these two fatty acids are consistent.” Read that last word CONSISTENT. There are no other Omega 3 formats that can show the same volume of data. Not krill not “natural triglyceride” not retriglycerided NONE!

8) Here is more from that same article EPA and DHA as ethyl esters inhibit platelet aggregability, and reduce serum triglycerides, while leaving other serum lipids essentially unaltered. Glucose metabolism has been studied extensively, and no adverse effects were seen. Pro-atherogenic cytokines are reduced, as are markers of endothelial activation. Endothelial function is improved, vascular occlusion is reduced, and the course of coronary atherosclerosis is mitigated. Heart rate is reduced, and heart rate variability is increased by EPA and DHA. An antiarrhythmic effect can be demonstrated on the supraventricular and the ventricular level. More importantly, two large studies showed reductions in clinical endpoints like sudden cardiac death or major adverse cardiac events.

9) Ethyl Esters are not found naturally in humans or in nature. Truth: Ethyl Esters are naturally occurring intermediates in the Omega 3 chain. This is often how other forms (phospholipid and triglyceride) become the single chain mediators they need to to create the Omega 3 effects against inflammation. In addition they are they main form of Omega 3 found in Calanus finmarchicus a kind of shrimp that inhabits the Northern Atlantic. So there goes that argument as well.

There is a reason you will not see well designed honest head to head studies comparing the effects of something like Ultra 85 to any of these other formats. All you will see and hear are people you never heard of claiming to be experts hawking their products. I do that too don’t I. But I design and chose my products based on science testing and what I would want for myself and my family.
If you knew what I know this is the only stuff you would consider ultra 85 and regular PG fish oil

Doc

PS If you want to learn more go to my telecom here.

References:
Ramprasath et al.

(Lipids Health Dis 12:178, 2013
Author: Peter D NicholsSoressa M KitessaMahinda Abeywardena
Credits/Source: Lipids in Health and Disease 2014, 13:2 “(Lipids Health Dis 12:178, 2013)”These conclusions are not justified and misleading. Considerable care is needed in ensuring that such comparative trials do not use inappropriate ingredients”

Metabolic Effects of Krill Oil are Essentially Similar to Those of Fish Oil but at Lower Dose of EPA and DHA, in Healthy Volunteers
Stine M. Ulven, Bente Kirkhus, […], and Jan I. Pedersen study funded by Acker Biomarine Please note the words “Essentially Similar” and this was using the lowest level fish oil they could find! This stud also noted an unexplained rise in inflammatory Omega 6 fatty acids with krill supplementation!
Vasc Health Risk Manag. 2006;2(3):251-62.
A review of omega-3 ethyl esters for cardiovascular prevention and treatment of increased blood triglyceridelevels.
von Schacky C.

2013 The Year in Review

First let me wish the Happiest of New Years and a phenomenal 2014. I can tell you that if 2013 is any indication, 2014 will be spectacular.

And speaking of 2013 I want to give you a brief perspective on this passing year from Dr Dave’s Best point of view both in terms of accomplishments and some personal stuff as well.

As always I like to start with a broad associative allegory about something I have learned and something I have sought.

Several hundred years ago there was a brilliant French essayist named Montaigne. He wrote about many things in such a succinct fashion that I have often sought his counsel through his work during my adult life time.

One characteristic he wrote about struck a chord with me in recent years: Equanimity. I made it a point in my New Year’s resolutions to seek it out and I can tell you that after 2 years of “asking” I think I found it in recent months and will only build on it.

My version of Equanimity is being balanced and centered in the knowledge of who I am and what I am to do here on this earth. Because of it the ups and down, the ebbs and flows and the fractal nature of life and time are more easy to walk through on an even plane.

Sound complicated? Just think balanced no matter what comes your way and you’ll have it. Trust me it’s a good place to be.

It is also the thing that allows me to tell you with 100% certainty that you are going to enjoy this next year with me if you chose to do so because massive break throughs are coming.

But let’s not forget 2013, so here we go.

In the earliest part of the year and leading in from December 2012 we introduced RG Stem Cell Activating Serum.  At the same time we also introduced the newly revised and redesigned Telomere Edge Packs. Each represented a never before created achievement and brought the promise of telomere preservation and stem cell activation within the reach of everyone on the list.

In March I reintroduced a product I had been sitting on for over 2 years, Ultra 85 fish oil. The ‘world debut’ of the product happened 7 weeks later at David Wolfe’s Longevity Now Conference. The great ironies of this were two: first this is where the product was originally introduced 2 years prior but because of the production costs we could not yet sustain its manufacture, next UPS lost our entire shipment.  You might have guessed that we were able to figure out how to make the product affordable both to us and the public. You might not have guessed that even in its absence, we sold out of the entire batch that would have arrived and filled those orders from our warehouse stock a few days later.

Immediately upon my return I introduced our contest which you can still participate in.  I can recall having an epiphany when I asked, “How do I get people excited about this contest and wanting to participate?”  You see back in the day when I first started rewards and free stuff was all the enticement one needed. Now 13 years later people are jaded and over marketed on the internet and I bet if I promised a million dollar reward no one would even read it! So I decided to tell everyone who joins the contest the main reason I wake up every morning.  To do research on products that will improve your life.

That seemed to be enough to get people moving because they understood they would directly benefit from the effort.

Two months later I was in Canada coaching my sister on her first Canadian Death Race and by the end of the month I was in the company of one Laurel Sander OMD getting healed big time at a full-fledged cleansing retreat. You can see some pics from my most recent trip there a few weeks ago. Suffice it to say the healing took and after 3 years of lower than desired physical activity I am back to my old self again. Now understand this is the culmination of a lot of things I do.  If you have followed me for any length of time you know I ask a lot of my mind and body and I am happy to say it’s delivering again.

During this time I also had my telomeres measured several times in both peripheral white blood cells and in my stem cells.  The later results are part of one of the studies I am currently doing so I cannot divulge that info but my peripheral cells gained over 600 base pairs using 2 separate assays and my immune profile has improved dramatically as well- all from taking TA-65 and the Telomere Edge Packs.  Depending on what you want to use as a starting point I have reversed the aging process in this most important cellular compartment by anywhere from 6 to 10 years.  The remarkable thing is I see it and feel it in my mind, my body and my performance. I am getting YOUNGER!!!

Now the skeptics among the world have said, “OK big shot you talk a good game now let’s see the numbers!  Why won’t you show us the numbers?”  So in a rare bow to peer pressure I have decided that I will reveal all the numbers on their official report sheets so all the naysayers can shut up ( hint that will never happen no matter what proof I offer LOL). But I do ask one favor in return after I do this.  People seem to love to call me on my credentials which are in fact a matter of public record if certain skeptics would get off their lazy asses and do a minimal amount of research. Again it’s much easier and more authoritative to simply fire it off as a command and hope I jump when you say how high than it is to type in “google”. But I will do the work just this once but in return I ask the following: There are a lot of big named people out there that you trust just based on their web popularity. So ASK THEM TO PUT THEIR MONEY WHERE THEIR MOUTH IS AND SHOW YOU THEIR TELOMERE LENGTHS.   I can tell you that more than one of them has done the test and been angry and shocked that their results sucked! Ask them and you’ll get a bunch of BS excuses about how the test is not accurate. The test is deadly accurate but the way they live their lives and their own information is faulty in terms of your health and longevity.

There I said it. Now you figure out who I am talking about and demand the same accountability from them. And while you are busy waiting for what will never come I will remain totally transparent because your life and your decisions depend on it.

That brings us to the late summer early fall when the next RG products arrived from the lab: The Booster, The Cleanser and the Blemish Cream. If you have not seen the videos on these products they can be found here on YouTube.

Also available there is the complete teleseminar on omega 3’s. If you have ever been confused about everything you hear about fish oil this is a great way to get the real truth. The difference between this and the marketing hype is I show you the actual biochem texts, articles and the results of over 150 Omega 6/3 ratio tests I have done.  I have honestly never seen anyone else try to back up what they say this way. Pretty sure the reason is they can’t but you be the judge!

And while you are on YouTube you can see me getting my telomeres tested on several different occasions, testing Omega 6/3 ratios and reviewing the honest data on krill, triglyceride fish oil and generally debunking myths left and right!

From September through December the work you did during the contest paid off. I was able to do additional research on telomere length and stem cells which has never been done. It will be at least another 6 months before the results are in but I will be once again in Mexico treating myself in a few weeks. By being the guinea pig here I am doing the kind of research you should be demanding of any internet doc who claims he is pioneering and cutting edge.

The same stem cell team I employ for the research just gave me the preliminary findings on RG cell serum and booster and showed that we are increasing youthful collagen production in skin fibroblasts. I will have the final report out to you in January 2014.

I will also continue to test these products for stem cell activation.

Speaking of products I have at least 2 new ones slated for release in the next 60 days so stay tuned!

Now a little personal info.  I have continued to meet speak with and learn from the best and brightest on the planet and that continues to be reflected in my newsletters and blogs.

And that is a lucky thing for you and me!

Happy New Year!!!!

Doc

Are You Immune to Aging

Telomeres are the end segments of every chromosome that function as a biologic time clock. Their overall length and health determines how long your cells will live.

Over the past few years it has become more and more common to measure telomere length in blood cells, specifically white blood cells that represent your immune system. Lately with the advent of the HT Q FISH technology from Life Length this type of measurement has become accurate enough for doctors and individuals who are simply interested in their health to use for monitoring purposes.

But in all this there was very fortunate accident. The cells chosen in blood were picked for 3 main reasons.

1)      They were easy to get.  A simple blood draw and you have everything you need without having to biopsy some major tissue.

2)      Unlike Red Blood Cells, the white blood cells have a nucleus and that means they have DNA. That also means they have telomeres at the end of the segments of DNA in those white blood cells that can be measured.

3)      White blood cells are turned over rapidly and are constantly being produced. To help with this process they have an enzyme that is active pretty much only in rapidly dividing cells. This enzyme is called telomerase.  Telomerase turns out to also be a major key to longevity and health span as well.

So the bottom line is the measurement of Your telomeres in the blood shows the status of your immune health in many ways. Positive changes in immune health have been associated in 3 different types of studies using the telomerase activator TA-65.

Specifically human cell culture studies, animal studies and human studies have shown a positive response in the form of strengthening the immune system.  Independent questionnaires I have done and others have done have shown this as well: immune strengthening means far less coughs and colds!

A study recently released from the University of Utah showed this correlation as well. Longer telomeres= stronger immune system= less sickness!

So now we have a couple of interesting points by way of review.

1)      You can measure your telomere length in an effective accurate way using Life Length HT-QFISH technology.

2)      You can equate this telomere length to a bunch of different things including how long you might actually be able to live* and especially how strong your immune system is**.

3)      You can potentially strengthen your immune system with TA-65.

By now you might be wondering OK but what is really the big deal about the immune system other than coughs and colds?

The answer lies in the predictive value of your immune system health in terms of your overall health and quite possibly your longevity.

Let’s take the average American. One thing we can say for sure is that the average citizen of this country is way too low in Omega 3 fats and thus is walking around in an inflamed state. We can also equate this inflammation to America’s number one killer- heart disease, and a whole host of other “age related” diseases.  I put that in quotes because some of you may know I think that aging IS THE DISEASE and telomere lengths is kinda like the cholesterol test of aging.

The average American being inflamed has an immune system problem. His or her own body is targeting itself. The immune system is slowly damaging areas where it should not and less able to work where it is needed. That is not a healthy Immune System.  Now that does indeed show up in telomere length tests when you look at people with heart disease. Perhaps even more ironic is the significant effect of TA-65 on cholesterol. ***

What is the next hit our immune systems take? Answer: chronic and acute viral infections.  You may not have or even know what things like EBV, CMV or HIV are, but as chronic viruses that overwork the immune system or in some cases poison it they represent a major risk to health.

But to a lesser degree so do things like the flu and other seasonal viruses. If you are an adult your immune system should be able to fight off even new strains of flu and not make you sick. Instead we have to rely on flu shots and other methods of defense.  When we get the flu we are often sick for a lot longer than the infection should last. That represents your immune system trying to recover from the insult. If it’s weak you can very well wind up with bacterial pneumonia or some other infection following the flu.  One in three people who are reading this blog know exactly what I am talking about because they have been sick for months following a flu infection.

OK that is infectious illness, age related disease, and aging overall.

Then there is the special case of cancer which strikes through “immune holes”.  The Immune Surveillance theory of cancer is widely accepted now. It says that if your body has a healthy immune system cancer will not take root. It is only when there is a hole that it can get past that it can grow. Recently a drug for prostate cancer was approved that “programs your immune system to fight the cancer”. If this is not an acknowledgement of the Immune Surveillance Theory I don’t know what is!

So what should we really take from telomere measurements? Ideally we should understand they reflect the health of our Immune System and even if it’s just lucky that we can easily get these cells, it is a very important thing to know based on everything I just told you.

Simply put in many cases the Immune System is a primary driver in how well you age and how long you live.

Skeptical?  Watch the mortality rates from cancer and infection climb over the next 2 decades and then tell me what you think!

How can you protect your immune system and help it do its job?

Answer: Take care of Your Telomeres!

Dr Dave

Note: TA-65 is not a drug it’s a supplement. It is not FDA approved for anything and these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA and probably never will be unless Big Pharma comes out with a Telomerase Activating Drug. That will not happen until the pioneers in the field do all the work for them first.

*and ** These statements are best supported by serial telomere measurements. You need more than one measurement at more than one point in time because what you are really looking for is the CHANGE in the length of your telomeres, not the absolute length. In addition the HT-QFISH technology is the only one that gives % short telomeres, another critical factor in see where YOU really stand.

*** This study is available on Pub Med released Oct 2013

The latest TA-65 Human Study results

Science is like Molasses… it flows slowly.

Ever since the 2010 human study on TA-65 was published I have been telling you about the “other half” of the data. I had access to it so I shared it with you but naturally the naysayers and skeptics said, “I’ll believe it when I see it!”

So here it is 3 years later! But before I repeat what I have been telling you let me tell you this:

I did not have to make any changes in what I said because the published study tells you exactly the same thing I have been telling you.  Nothing was “wrong” and nothing has changed!

As it has in the past the fact that I have been privy to information that has not been publically available is bound to upset people. This was best pointed out when one of my colleagues commented on our book, “The Immortality Edge” by saying, “Well you are Right Now but You were wrong when you wrote it!”

Once again he was commenting on the fact that I knew things that he and others did not. SORRY!

I have made it my business to be at the front of this field as many other people are at the front of their fields. Many of the same doctors that criticized me for publishing facts that were based on unpublished studies have inside information in their areas of expertise. This just happens to be mine!

Next I want to tell you there is a movement to equate cycloastraganol with TA-65. This is true and that is exactly what TA-65 is but it is not that simple. There is a difference between the format TA-65 is provided in. The “MD” is a micro dispersed format that makes it bioavailable. There are no studies that equate simple powdered Cycloastragenol that is available for $68,000 a kilo in the one market with the MD format. As a matter of fact no one has done Pharmacokinetic studies on any form of Cyclo except TA-65. I also have not seen any purity studies on these powdered products looking for toxins and contaminants so frequently found in imported raw materials!

As a matter of fact no one has done ANY human studies on ANY telomerase activators other than specifically TA-65 with the exception of Geron Scientist Calvin Harley who continues to develop other telomerase activators.

To say that Cycloastragenol in any form can be equated to the human results obtained with TA-65 is deliberately misleading and not accurate. Do the studies in people! Then you can make claims. And if you are claiming equivalency then do the head to head studies using TA-65 versus your product.

There is a reason people selling telomerase activation products are not doing human studies.  I do know of studies that were attempted and failed miserably of products that are now being offered as such. All I will say is the parent companies have backed off their rhetoric.

Ok in case you missed the last 3 years of my newsletters and blogs here is what the October 2013 published human study which was part 2 of the original human study said about TA-65 and the protocol that accompanied it:

Statistically significant:

• Reduction in blood pressure
• Increased Bone Density
• Decreased inflammatory marker: Homocystiene
• Decreased blood sugar
• Decreased Insulin secretion
• Impressively reduced cholesterol!

Along with the previously documented changes in the immune system and the reduction in short telomeres. I have been following my own telomere length and short telomere percentages now for the 4 years I have been on TA-65 and both have improved significantly.

More importantly I continue to feel and look younger!

The choices is yours but if you want the proof, you have only one choice: TA-65.

Doc

• Please note the human studies above refer to a protocol that included a multivitamin. None of the ingredients in the multi have been shown to activate telomerase or lengthen telomeres but this remains the major criticism of the study. TA Sciences in now conducting a study using ONLY TA-65. While we have no reason to believe that the multi + TA-65 changed the properties of TA to Make it a telomerase activator when it was not one, and we have specific evidence that TA-65 does turn on telomerase and the other ingredients in the multi do not, it still remains a bone of contention for some scientists.

The randomized double blinded study now going on should shut those people up but it will take a year to complete and 1 to 2 years to go to publication.  Like I said, real science moves slowly which is why some people do chemical studies like chromatorgraphy and use them to influence your thinking. They are cheap fast but of little value in human biology!

Reference: Rejuvenation Res. 2013 Oct;16(5):386-95. doi: 10.1089/rej.2013.1430.

A natural product telomerase activator as part of a health maintenance program: metabolic and cardiovascular response.

Harley CB, Liu W, Flom PL, Raffaele JM.

Unhealthy Telomeres greatly increase the Risk of Cancer

Even though I recently released a blog that looks specifically at prostate cancer and the effect of telomere length on prognosis, I mentioned breast cancer in that blog as another form of hormonally driven cancer that shares many features behaviorally with prostate cancer.

The ink on that blog had barely dried when yet another study came out that reinforces the same basic message: short telomeres are an increased risk for cancer.

So let’s get to a few basics and then look at the “new” information.

1)      Telomeres are found at the end of the chromosome. They are relatively short segments of repetitive DNA. They have a protein complex attached to them that shelters them from damage and controls access to them. This is called “Shelterin”

2)      Telomeres function as a cellular time clock keeping track of how many times a cell has divided making new cells and how many divisions it has left. When the time runs out that cell is removed and either dies or goes into “park” for a while and dies a bit later.

3)      Both of the events in #2 involve inflammation and can cause damage to the surrounding cells. This process occurs more frequently as we age giving rise to the statement “aging is an inflammatory event!” Some researchers have called these dying cells “Zombie Cells” because they are dead and dying but also kill other healthy cells in their area.

4)      Telomerase is the enzyme that lengthens telomeres. As far as we know activating telomerase is the only feasible way to extend life span in complex mammals. Immortal non cancerous human cell lines have been created by turning on telomerase.

5)      Cancer hijacks telomerase and massively over expresses it to keep cancer cells alive and “immortal” at least until the host (hopefully not YOU!) dies.

6)      In most cases of cancer the induction of huge increases in telomerase is thought to be the “last step” in the transformation of cancer into a malignant immortal cell. This means that there are several other mutations or missteps that have to happen first. It also raises questions about the real effects of blocking telomerase as an anti-cancer therapy since all of the other steps are not blocked in this therapy and could give rise to other cancer cells that are immortal using other methods of telomere lengthening (ALT).

OK now onto the “new” information and I put it in quotes because there have been at least half a dozen scientific articles that have said this before. But that is the way science is and in most cases should be. It requires a lot of repetition and validation from the community before it is accepted.

One of the things that you may already know about breast cancer is that there is a hereditary component. The BRAC1 and BRAC2 genes have gotten a lot of press lately as more than one famous actress has had bilateral mastectomies and other operations to protect from the high risk of breast cancer associated with these genes.

But you should also know that hereditary breast cancer accounts for only 10% of breast cancers and the famous BRAC genes account for a little over half of this total. That means that 90% of breast cancers are not hereditary but more likely the result of “acquired” genomic instabilities that happen during life as a result of toxins, stresses both physical and mental and of course bad luck in the form of mistakes in DNA replication.

The one thing that hereditary breast cancers and non hereditary breast cancers have in common is an unstable genome the hall mark of which is an unnaturally short telomere. This may actually the difference between getting cancer (remember between 15 and 45% of BRAC positive women do not ever get breast cancer) and not; no one is 100% sure.

But it is a very suggestive association since non hereditary breast cancers also have short telomeres as a risk factor.

As a matter of fact nearly every major form of cancer that has been studied has an association with critically shortened telomeres and the genomic instability that comes with that condition. Numerous other conditions associated with “normal aging” including Alzheimer disease, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis are also associated with short telomeres.

Clinical trials to treat these illnesses with telomerase activation are going on or being planned as we speak.

In the meantime know that the only safe human tested telomerase activator is TA-65. I have been able to document over 3% reduction in my critically short telomere values and over 4 years a 600 base pair lengthening of my average telomere length using the “gold standard” Life Length assay, using this product in conjunction with high dose Omega 3’s (which I have used for over 10 years so it’s not likely they started working all of a sudden!) and the life style modifications detailed in our book, “The Immortality Edge”.

Because neither the government nor Big Pharma has any vested interest in anti-aging therapy the typical types of studies we have been inundated with for drugs like statins and blood pressure medicines are slow to come. Private funding is being put to work, some of it is mine, but it is not the hundreds of millions of dollars that large corporations have.  Now that Google is on board we’ll see if they can jump start the campaign.

In the meantime you may want to take a close look at my other blogs and sign up for my newsletters because I have been talking about this stuff for a long time now.  And during that time I have managed to grow younger!

Best,

Dr Dave

Telomeres and Cancer- More than just Length

Telomeres are our cellular biologic time clocks. They are found at the end of every healthy chromosome. It they are short that chromosome and the cell it lives in are headed for disaster. By disaster I mean,

1) Removal from the functional cell pool leaving you with fewer healthy cells to do their job.

2) Auto suicide where the cell blows up from the inside out also known as apoptosis- same result fewer healthy cells to do the job.

3) Cancer-that’s right cancer. An article in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association showed that short telomeres are equated to increased cancer incidence and increased cancer severity.

Bottom line message: short telomeres are bad for you

Ok let’s look at some more studies that reinforce the message.

In the October issue of Cancer Discovery a large group of men with known prostate cancer that was initially confined to the prostate gland were evaluated for telomere length in their tumors. Their findings confirm the importance of telomere length in both initial cancer treatment and its follow up.

They found that a variable telomere length or a wide distribution of telomere length when combined with short telomeres in the surrounding non cancerous tissue led to a higher likelihood of the prostate cancer metastasizing (spreading).

Men with this combination of telomere pathology had a 14X higher chance of dying in less than 10 years than men who did not.

Dr Dave comments:

First remember that prostate cancer is a very variable disease. The current recommendations for screen are far less aggressive than even 2 years ago because recent data indicates there is enough low grade disease out there that will not significantly shorten the life span of the men that have it that finding all the prostate cancers we can and diagnosing them and/or treating them is MORE likely to kill the patient or cause significant harm than letting men live out their lives with the disease.

If you look at the recommendations for things like mammograms chest X rays Pap smears and all manner of “routine screening” tests these have ALL changed in the past few years because we realize we did more harm than good by being super aggressive about looking for these diseases in low risk populations.

That said having a good indicator of the people we SHOULD watch closely when we do diagnose a disease is incredibly valuable for the use of our health care dollars and resources. Using telomere measurements of this kind could help us select the people who needed much closer and more aggressive follow up where the risk of things like biopsies or the expense of PSA blood testing is justified. It’s like using telomeres to tailor make the treatment and follow up plan.

As far as the “wide distribution” of telomere lengths be aware that this is common in many different cancers. In some cases it means that telomere length goes from ultra short to short. In other cases it means telomere length varies from short to actually being longer than normal. Much of the “lengthening” of telomeres is actually false or misleading in a sense because it occurs from telomere end to end recombinations or the so called ALT method. This ALT method is almost always a very bad sign because it takes massive chromosomal instability to allow this to happen. This means the chromosome is super damaged and the genome is very unstable, both hall marks of bad cancers.

The fact that the surrounding tissues had short telomeres suggests again genomic instability and weakened sick cells that are “acting weak and old” or senescent. This would mean tumor invasion would be almost invited into the surrounding tissue.

It also reinforces something I have written about many times before when discussing the various methods for measuring telomeres. I prefer the Life Length assay over all others because it measures the percentage of short telomeres. No other test can do this accurately for the individual. Short telomeres are the hallmark of sick dysfunctional old cells that are more likely to cause cancer and disease!

You should also know similar studies in breast and many other cancers as well as heart disease also link telomere length to prognosis. The day is coming when telomere length will be a routine part of staging most cancers.

But here is the most important thing: Staging a cancer is not a great thing. Not getting one in the first place is much better.

Many of us in the telomere field myself included believe that since short telomeres are an increased risk for cancer, longer healthier ones are potentially protective. We know that people and animals with longer telomeres tend to have longer life spans and longer health spans (the amount of their lives spent in a health state) than those with shorter ones.

This is why I am so aggressive about telomerase activators like TA-65 and telomere preservers like Fish oil.

I would rather hear I do not have cancer than be told what stage it is in!

Think about it and do more research and you will feel the same way too!

Dr Dave

Still not Dead!

In mid-July a ridiculous poorly designed poorly done study was published by a “reputable journal” from the National Cancer Institute.  It associated “high Omega 3 intake” with a 70% increased risk of prostate cancer. It was published by one Dr T. Brasky and his research time and derived from a sub group analysis of another study called the SELECT Trail designed to look at the effects of selenium on prostate cancer risk.

In my blog “As I lay Dying” and the subsequent blogs after it I detailed how absurd the Brasky study was. I concluded that in my opinion the negative press was absolutely a deliberate ploy in the part of these researchers to get attention.

Sadly it worked.

For a while.

I remember one irate gentleman out there who engaged me on another web site basically saying that 3 well known experts including a nationally famous Urologist and a well-known Endocrinologist said it was dangerous and “did I think I knew more about prostate cancer than they did”.

I didn’t bother to answer at that point because it was pointless but here is the answer I would have given: “No I don’t know more about prostate cancer, but I know a hell of a lot more about Omega 3’s and fish oil than those bozo’s!”

So for about 6 weeks I stood as pretty much a lone voice for fish oil.

But I predicted in due time another study, a better designed study, a study that was actually asking a question instead of selling and agenda, would come out and refute any association and support the use of fish oil as a beneficial thing in prostate cancer.

This by the way is not rocket science. The positive studies on fish oil outnumber the negative 99.9 to1.

So a recent study from UCLA was just released that showed the combination of a low fat diet along with fish oil ( which is ALL fat by the way!) may help prevent recurrent prostate cancer and decrease its growth .

One comment the only role of eating a low fat diet in this disease and other diseases in my opinion is that it limits the amount of grain fed Omega 6 rich meat these men consumed. If they ate free range grass fed I think it would be of additional help.

One way to boost the Omega 3 ratio in the blood is to consume less of its opposite, Omega 6.

Restricting Omega 6 and increasing Omega 3 are critical to cancer prevention in everything I have ever read.

Which leads me to the final statement. I think the National Cancer Institute’s allowance of Dr Brasky’s study to be published was bordering on criminal.

Worse werethe statements he allegedly made recommending people to consume more Omega 6.

That advice will in my opinion actually increase your risk of cancer.

To all the internet guru’s, internet doctors, cowardly health care providers, news anchors and “experts” who immediately jumped on the “Fish oil may increase risk of Prostate Cancer” where are you now?

Probably onto some other trending story that will boost your sales and your ratings.

 

To the guy who told me I was wrong and he was right because he had expert opinion on his side, I am waiting for your letter of apology.

I have yet to see one retraction from anyone.

To all my faithful readers, clients, customers and patients who had learned enough from me to know this whole thing was bogus I say congratulations for not being snowed by “public opinion”.

If anything, after 12 years you know I tell you the truth even when it is not popular. I don’t side with the traditional allopathic agenda. I don’t side with the Holistic or Alternative agenda. I routinely disagree with “experts” on both sides of that fence.

Me? I side with the truth. And believe me there is truth out there.

That truth is all you and me will ever need to live our best lives!

With deepest appreciation…

Dr Dave

PS Not only am I not dead, but I am growing younger as we speak!!!

Telomere Length and Life Stress – It all counts

Have you seen the recent articles that link childhood stress to shorter telomere length in adults? Actually this information is not new. Last year a study of Rumanian orphans came out showing the same thing: children in difficulty in early life lost telomere length and had shorter telomeres as adult.

Remember this will statistically equate to shorter life span overall.

Then a few months ago cold susceptibility was linked to shorter telomeres in the typically measured immune cells we use to determine telomere length.  Not really surprising if you understand the role between immunosenescence and disease vulnerability. Basically short telomeres equate to a weaker immune system and a weaker immune system means more infections. But it also means more aging in general. Now would be a good time for me to remind you that TA-65 has, in all of its study forms, cell culture, animal, and human, strengthened the immune system.

Some of you will get the flu shot in hopes of doing this. Ever get the shot and get sick anyway? Ever wonder why? Sorry I will have to leave you to connect the dots on that one, but TA-65 appears to work year round as long as you are taking it.

Back to the studies.  Now we have a study that shows that childhood stress and adult cold susceptibility are related. Since I am asking you to connect the dots what do you think the common link is?

If you said telomeres you get a double helix popsicle for Christmas!

Studies done at the University of Utah and others have made this connection along with the tie in to longevity.

Here’s how it works.

There are 2 ways to shorten telomeres that are normally active in you and I. Cellular replication or cells dividing into other cells usually to repair and replace dead or dying cells, and damage from oxidative stress.  In each case the meter on your life span is ultimately running and that meter is the telomere.

The more damage from either situation, the faster the meter runs out.

Fortunately there are many things you can do to slow down and ever reverse this process. Telomerase the enzyme that repairs and in some cases lengthens the telomere is normally turned off.

TA-65 has been proven to turn it back on again.  Fish oil has been equated to longer telomeres.  Staying healthy and not getting sick helps a lot as well.

Our book The Immortality Edge has chapter upon chapter of information about other things to use and do as well including stress reduction techniques.

It can be done and if you value your life and your health I urge you to do something NOW.

The only thing you can be sure of otherwise is you are aging.

Doc

What is Two Years worth?

The answer to that question has many different answers. I know this for a fact because I asked it at a recent conference I spoke at and I got as many different answers as there were people willing to answer it!

The ranges varied from $10,000 through millions to “priceless”!  As long as it was 2 healthy years of course!

So the next question is: “When is Two Years not Two Years.

The answer to that question requires a little more science and a little more explanation.

First I have to tell you I read the press release that was “written for me” with a mixture of humor and horror. You see my past experiences with press releases have taught me that this is one type of writing I am not good at. I would say 70% of the press releases I have written in the past were rejected and never made it to publication. So this time I hired an expert because the message is too important: I really am showing objective if not universally accepted signs of getting younger from my telomeres to my bone marrow.

And like one of the heads of a large “CEO farm” I talked to recently wanted to know, I can give objective value to how someone is doing versus the rest of people in their age range.

So when is 2 years not really 2 years?

Answer” When it is actually more like 7 or 8 years.

Let me explain by telling you about to types of age: chronologic age- how many birthdays you’ve counted, and biologic age- how old your cells act versus the rest of the population in your age range.

For biologic age you can use either median telomere length or percentage of short telomeres but the later is far more indicative of your actual biologic age.* This is why I only use the Life Length Assay for individual telomere evaluations and why I also am using it for our stem cell studies. There are other companies promising similar evaluations at a lower cost but when you ask them to show you the science as to how, you get no response. Especially when they figure out you are not a newbie to the field.

So if you read our press releases you know that I am actually biologically 2 years younger now than I am chronologically. To be clear I have counted 54 birthdays but I am 52 biologically.

If you think about it that is kinda magical and there is not much on this planet that will do that for you other than what I have outlined in these recent blog posts.

But there actually is more. Before I started TA-65 in 2009 I had a baseline test done which showed my telomeres to be close to 60 years old. I was 50 years old then and had been on a lot of good things to help with the aging process for a long time. As a matter of fact I am Board Certified in Anti-Aging so I practiced everything I was taught on myself as well as my patients. But biologically I was still 10 years older than my stated age. In other words, in spite of all that good stuff I had gotten older faster than I should have.

Now a couple of things should be entertained here. First we don’t know how bad or good I would have been had I not done all those “standard anti-aging practices” including diet and exercise.  Next you have to account for the life of a busy Internist in my earlier years which had to have taken its toll. Years of life or death stress, minimal sleep, 80 to 100 hour work weeks for at least a decade superimposed on heavy weight lifting and ultra marathons in excess of 75 miles do not make a particularly healthy life style.

Rather than defend what some of my readers have called “extreme behavior” I will simply say that in those years I felt invincible.

But my telomeres knew and my telomeres didn’t lie.

I had aged a full decade beyond my time. Specifically for those of you skeptics out there my telomere length was recorded at 6.90Kbs.  A few months ago I had it measured again and along with a reduction in short telomeres from my last test of 3% (doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s significant!) my telomere length was 7.53Kbs putting me, for the first time, on the correct side of the aging curve.**

So let’s look at this for a minute. In the past few years my telomeres “grew” both healthier (fewer short telomeres) and longer. Neither of those things is supposed to happen as you get older, in my case 4 years older. If you look at biologic age I started at 60 and now I am 52. If you look at chronologic age I started at 50 and now I am 54.

So in the 4 years since I started TA-65 and practiced the things I wrote about in The Immortality Edge I was able to reverse my biologic age by 8 years! So even though I am only 2 years younger than my chronologic age when I started, biologically, I am actually a full 8 years younger.

Couple this with my young looking bone marrow, the strong healthy growth of my stem cells and my very healthy looking cellular peripheral blood sample I have every reason to be excited.

And so do you because from day one I have shared what I do and how I do it with my readership through the book, the newsletters and the blog.

You can know everything I know and you can do some or all of what I do if you value your future at the same level I do mine.

And it’s working!

Doc

*In the interest of disclosure you should know that not every telomere scientist believes in the biologic age concept. This is one reason I am studying what is happening to the stem cell population as a result of these interventions.  It may take a few years to come to the final conclusion but as you can see from the above-the preliminary indications are very exciting. Some of the crusty old scientists in the field will say this is all running around in circles and we should neither be excited by improvements in these things nor should we try to mess with them. My years as a clinician watching the suffering and loss of dignity that too often accompanies the aging process tells ME differently and I will not sit by and be passive.

The not so crusty younger bunch of scientists I hang out with are gobbling TA-65 and anything else they can that positively affects their telomere lengths (hint fish oil!)

I also believe that the leaps and bounds that we need to make will come from a small group of people who are willing to be guinea pigs like I am. Nothing I tell you to do has shown anything but positive health consequences and it will always be that way because I will be doing it to myself, followed by my loved ones, followed by a small group of trusting and dedicated volunteers LONG BEFORE it ever gets to you. That said as soon as I am sure it’s safe and effective YOU hear about it. But as in the case of our book which has been out for 3 years now, the initial reaction is often less than skeptical because we are on the cutting edge and doing things with information not generally available to the rest of the world including many scientists and doctors. Boy does this piss them off! But they never come back and say “Hey you were right all along!” Instead they say, “Everybody knows that!” as if they knew it all along too.

** There is a degree of variation with all tests, especially telomere tests. The Life Length assay has the lowest possible variation of 5% completely in line with the “biologic system” in this case the variability of telomere length one could normally expect to see. If you apply that in a negative fashion to the numbers above I am still at least 4 years younger biologically. Equally likely is a variation the other way actually undervaluing my telomere growth by 5% which would mean I am even younger biologically- closer to a full decade! Either way I win and so do you!

Finally I was paid the highest compliment I could ever ask for just a few minutes before I wrote this to you. The chief scientist of the stem cell company I am working with called me and said, “I need to get on that stuff you are taking!”

It’s on its way my friend, it’s on its way.

Slowing Down Telomere Loss with Fish oil – Just a Little Too Convenient!

Life is kinda funny at times.  A few years back I was motoring along minding my own business on the internet doing the fish oil, telomere and anti-aging thing I’ve always done and no one seemed to care much.

Now all of a sudden entering my 12^th year I seem to be getting people’s attention again.

Now it would be expected that it is not all good but here are a few rather humorous examples of why I don’t even bother to defend myself any more.

1)      In the past few months I have been accused of being a “Johnny come lately” in the telomere field.

2)      An individual who basically attacked my stance on TA-65 2 years ago resurfaced and “demanded” the same information I gave him then. Either he forgot or he enjoys being angry at me.

3)      A well known anti-aging doctor told a close friend of mine “He is right now but he was wrong then” referring to the fact that the studies and proof he wanted from our book The Immortality Edge were published after the book was published. Why do people always think that a published study happens overnight?  It never seems to occur that the findings may be known by a select group of people in the field before the general public.  Or maybe it just infuriates them that someone gets it before them.

The best thing I can say to that is to quote Mel Brooks from “The History of the World Part 1”.

It’s good to be the king!

The most recent example of what seems to be a growing infuriation with my track record of knowing things first is this comment which applies to the information I am about to tell you.

4)      A scientific colleague of mine who I occasionally bounce my writing off of wrote back after she read the information below and said, “Oh come on now! Fish oil and telomeres again!  That is just a little too convenient! You just wrote a bunch of telomere blogs. Do you pay these people to do the research and give it to you?!”

So I can assure you and her, I do not pay anyone to generate positive press about fish oil. The series of recent anti-fish oil attacks masquerading as science  should convince you of that!

As a matter of fact I do not know most of the people who publish these papers pro or con. I certainly have no idea given the vagaries of scientific publication when anything is going to come out.

I do know this: The wheels of science move slowly- and the wheels of scientific publication move even more slowly. Getting something from study to published article can take several years. This is why I hang out with the people doing the work. Sometimes I can share the facts with you on a very early basis as long as I do not damage the publication with too many specifics.

And while I am at it I may as well tell you that right now as we speak I know things that will not come out as published for at least 1 year even though they have already been peer reviewed. I can also tell you that thanks to some of my readers active participation on our contest I was able to fulfill a promise and fund launch my own studies (with a little help from the same friends from above!).

It’s good to have loyal readers and people who benefit from using my stuff!

So today I want to share an article with you that WAS published. It was published by people I do not know and I did not get any advanced notice.

This study was small like most “supplement” studies. In this study people over 65 with mild cognitive impairment were treated with 3 grams of fish oil for 6 months and compared to those receiving what would be representative of a typical American diet enriched with omega 6 fats. Remember these were the same inflammatory fats that The NCI researchers told us we should eat more of in the infamous “fish oil linked to prostate cancer” nonsense.

The researchers concluded: Telomeric shortening may be attenuated by n-3 PUFA supplementation*

OK just so you know n-3 PUFA’s are the same as fish oil. The 3 gram dose was only half of what I recommend and I think that there would have been an even greater difference had they used a level of fish oil supplementation that would have led to an even better Omega3 to Omega 6 ratio.

Also note the omega 6 people lost more telomere length!

Finally almost 4 years ago Nobel Laureate Liz Blackburn and Dr Farzaneh-Farr showed that higher doses of Omega 3 supplementation led to longer telomeres in heart patients.

Now we have at least 3 human trials that show omega 3 fats slow down the loss of telomeres. Where have you heard that before? Hint: RIGHT HERE IN THESE BLOGS AND MY NEWSLETTERS!

Now you know why I consider my Ultra 85 and TA-65 a perfect combination for telomere health.

I think you know by now my continued and serious research and endorsement of these things is more than just “convenient”.  But it sure is convenient to grow biologically younger as we count more birthdays!

Dr Dave

*As is now a requirement they also said, “more studies are needed”.  I couldn’t agree more!

Citations:

Telomere shortening in elderly people with mild cognitive impairment may be attenuated with omega-3 fatty acid supplementation: A randomised controlled pilot study

• Nathan O’Callaghan^1, , ,
• Natalie Parletta²,
• Catherine M. Milte²,
• Bianca Benassi-Evans¹,
• Michael Fenech¹,
• Peter RC. Howe^2, 3
• ¹ Preventative Health Flagship, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Adelaide
• ² Nutritional Physiology Research Centre and Sansom Institute for Health Research, School of Health Sciences, University of South Australia

Brain Behav Immun. 2013 Feb;28:16-24. doi: 10.1016/j.bbi.2012.09.004. Epub 2012 Sep 23.

Omega-3 fatty acids, oxidative stress, and leukocyte telomere length: A randomized controlled trial.

Kiecolt-Glaser JK, Epel ES, Belury MA, Andridge R, Lin J, Glaser R, Malarkey WB, Hwang BS, Blackburn E.

JAMA. 2010 Jan 20;303(3):250-7. doi: 10.1001/jama.2009.2008.

Association of marine omega-3 fatty acid levels with telomeric aging in patients with coronary heart disease.

Farzaneh-Far R, Lin J, Epel ES, Harris WS, Blackburn EH, Whooley MA.

Source

Division of Cardiology, Room 5G1, San Francisco General Hospital, 1001 Potrero Ave, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA

A Unified Theory of Aging Part 6

I have written several emails/blogs etc in the past dealing with health, disease and now aging. Since there were 5 prior writings dating back to 2004 and culminating with the most recent “Is aging unstoppable”.  I decided to name this one appropriately “Part 6”.

This is also a reminder to you that have been doing this a long long time. You could say I’ve grown old doing it except for the objective lengthening of my telomeres and the young looking bone marrow I have now that I did not have even 6 years ago!

Now it may not seem it from what I about to write but there is some major simplification going on here-enough to make any PhD in molecular biology break out their Dr Dave voodoo dolls and start pinning my effigy to the wall next to their favorite pentagram.

But in the simplicity of it lives the honesty as well.

So here it is.

If you really want to drill deep down into the aging process and more importantly how to fix it you have to look at DNA damage, the DNA repair and damage responses and yes, you have to remember that those little biologic time clocks we call telomeres are part of that DNA, and thus subject to damage and repair as well.

It wouldn’t hurt to remember that they are also “different” from genetic DNA in that they are somewhat isolated at the end of the chromosome and rather densely “protected” from the typical repair processes. So much so that they need a repair system of their very own which has been name “telomerase”.  If you’ve read any of my TA-65 writings then you know that telomerase is the enzyme that is activated by TA-65 resulting in a reduction of critically short telomeres, and in the one human study ( and multiple mouse and cell line studies) has resulted in reversal of some of the markers of aging including the all important reversal of immune system aging.

With all that in mind protection of all your DNA especially your telomeres is a really really good idea.

But how?!

If you look at the main causes of DNA damage, they would include UV and IR radiation, chemicals (more familiar to you as “toxins”!) and life style choices that accelerate free radical generation including lack of sleep, poor diet, too little or too much exercise and of course stress. So you should already be concluding that addressing these things to the extent that you can, will slow down the damage to your DNA and may help you live longer. If you need a refresher on this get our book The Immortality Edge!

You’d have to also look at what is often called Replication and Repair Infidelity of DNA. The first of these to R n’R’s occurs more frequently than you might think: somewhere between one in every million base pairs and one in  every billion base pairs. This doesn’t sound like much but consider that the average human genome has over 6 billion base pairs and that DNA is replicated pretty darn often and all of a sudden it looks more ominous. But that is where the repair fidelity (the second of the R ‘n R’s) comes in. Because we know the spontaneous mutation rate of DNA is lower than that of the number of replication mistakes, we can conclude there is a high fidelity proofreading and repair system at work. But it’s not perfect! If the repair process screws up and you get a faulty repair job. This can wind up being a mutation that does something usually bad or it can initiate the damage response and remove the offending DNA and its surrounding cell from the cellular pool by blowing it up (apoptosis) or just making sure it doesn’t replicate (senescence).

Do how do you improve DNA R ‘n R fidelity? Well the truth is you can’t. But you can at least not make it worse by generating more free radicals with all those life style choices we talked about a few moments ago. Trust me; the acceleration of this process is far more dangerous than the inherent infidelity of it for most of us!

Now let’s look separately at telomeres and telomerase. The biologic time clock function of the telomere hits a lot of other places in your cells as does the presence or absence of the enzyme telomerase. Recall that most cells have no telomerase expression, it’s completely shut off.  In very rapidly dividing cells or cells that need to maintain DNA integrity (so the genes are not messed up) telomerase is turned on to some extent.

The “lymphoid” or white blood cells which we will super simplify and call the major immune cells, are one of the few compartments where telomerase is required for continued function of that system.  Other notables include stem cells which provide the repair function of most tissues in varying degrees and germ line cells which keep us alive as a species by becoming sperm and eggs!

In terms of aging the integrity and function of our immune system and our stem cells are the major things that determine our aging processes. You might want to take note that the immune system is also highly dependent on stem cells for the constant supply of “body defenders” we need to live in this hostile environment we call planet Earth!

I should also point out that a couple of things that jump out at you if you follow the research on telomere length and telomerase activation including TA-65 are: improved immune function, improved wound repair and no increases in cancer.

Finally I want to touch on the cellular powerhouses known as the mitochondria. One criticism of the “telomere theory of aging” is that it does not address slowly dividing tissues like heart or brain.

If you look at aged heart and brain cells they do indeed have shorter telomeres. Probably more importantly and often forgotten is that the blood vessels that feed them have a more rapidly dividing lining that is telomere-aging dependent.  A tissue that doesn’t get blood gets sick and dies!

But let’s forget that for one second because if we make a “rule” of theory we have to explain everything no exception. Well, it does not matter if they are shorter because of cellular replication as in rapidly dividing tissues or because of free radical damage from all the things we just talked about above- the telomeres get shorter either way!

Recent work looking at the DNA damage signals thrown off by shortening telomeres shows a series of signals that ultimately affect the mitochondria in bad ways. Those bad ways include: decreased function, increased DNA damage and mutation to mitochondria DNA, and decreased new mitochondria and finally leaky mitochondrial membranes that are the hallmark of cellular senescence and aging!

All of that leads to impaired power generation in both highly replicative tissues and aging tissues. If you remember what I just said about immune cells and stem cells you will see how those 2 very critical cell lines are affected in this somewhat indirect but important way by telomere loss and damage.

You will also understand why I have said several times before that “aging is an inflammatory process which may be accelerated by telomere loss”.

Ok so by now you are saying, “I get it doc don’t get old!” A few scientists who will not admit they are even reading this blog are attaching my name to expletives and complaining about how “telomere centric” I am.

Here’s the thing. Telomere loss and damage may not be the only thing that causes aging. It may or may not be the major thing. But it is the clearest pathway to slowing or stopping the aging process we have ever identified. It crosses all the cell lines that are important for preservation of our species and of ourselves.  Telomerase activation has increased the life span and health span of mice modeled to mimic human aging and accepted by scientists the world over as valid models.  And in one human study with TA-65 it has led to improvements in health parameters and a decrease in the percentage of short telomeres that are known to drive the aging and disease process in people.

You got something better?

Doc

References:

DNA Replication Fidelity^*

1. Thomas A. Kunkel‡

+Author Affiliations

1. Laboratory of Molecular Genetics and Laboratory of Structural Biology, NIEHS, National Institutes of Health, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27709

The Maintenance of Mitochondrial DNA Integrity—Critical Analysis and Update

1. Mikhail Alexeyev,
2. Inna Shokolenko,
3. Glenn Wilson and
4. Susan LeDoux

+Author Affiliations

1. Department of Cell Biology and Neuroscience, University of South Alabama, Mobile, Alabama 36688

Your Work and My Promise Bear Fruit

Five months ago I launched a contest and I asked you for help. I told you I needed money to finance the kinds of studies that needed to be done in human rejuvenation.  I told you that the amount of work and the amount invested in people, real live people was tiny and it was taking far too long to get the answers you and I need.

I told you I wanted to do something about it but I needed your help.  I launched the contest and I told you I would make things happen.

I want you to know that last week with myself and a few other people as guinea pigs I took the first step to answering some questions that need very much to be answered and will contribute greatly to our understanding of aging and of course how to slow it down, stop it, or reverse it.

I can’t go into too much detail because the data are still being accumulated and the study will eventually need to be published. All of that means I can’t spill the beans.

But I will simply tell you this much. Doing what I do, the same things I tell you to do, I am visibly younger in some major parameters that involve telomere length and stem cell content and behavior. I am also visibly younger than the people who are chronologically younger than I am, again in some objective measurable ways.

The study we are doing will relate the behavior and state of telomere length to stem cell populations in the immune compartment. You may recall from much of my other telomere based writing how strongly I feel that the immune compartment and more specifically the reversal of immunosenescence is related to the aging process.

I wanted to thank you for your support, share my enthusiasm for what we are doing and what is going on in the field in general and to remind you of two things.

1)      In spite of the difficulties we face it’s a great time to be alive!

2)      Take care of your telomeres!

 

Doc

Telomeres linked to DNA “Dark Matter”

I swear the copywriters have gotten a hold of the scientists. I say this because for the past 20 years I have been following scientific literature and I have never seen such a proliferation of pithy titles and witty tag lines to describe brute force dry science ever as I have recently.  Not Ever!

The latest evidence of this comes to us by way of our friends from the University of Montreal who have found a way that telomerase, the enzyme that lengthens your telomeres, and the target of TA-65 gloms onto telomeres.

But not just any telomeres- the short telomeres.

The dramatic “copywrity” statement has to do with DNA’s dark matter- that mysterious force we don’t understand yet. Trust me in 5 years it will be routine as daylight!

So what is the dark matter and what does it mean for YOUR telomeres?

Recall that short telomeres are thought by many to represent the true “biologic age” of the organism (person!) since they drive the cells to explode from the inside out (apoptosis) or to go into park and secret inflammatory chemicals (senescence).  Much of what I have written to you about specific telomere testing is based on this. And it’s also the reason telomere tests that do not measure anything but mean telomere length are not all that valuable for a person trying to figure out where they stand. This is why I have done several of the Life length assays and will continue to recommend them to you.

Any way the folks in Montreal have found another regulatory molecule that brings telomerase to the telomere and concentrates it there where it needs to be to repair the telomere and insure genomic stability. That means the cells don’t blow up or secrete inflammatory chemicals!

If you remember the whole “short telomeres are bad” argument then you may remember at least one of the reasons we worry about them. Pick any one of these: cancer heart disease diabetes Alzheimer’s and arthritis and you have a clue!

What is really cool about this finding is that this particular molecule they have named TERRA is not a protein but a “non coding” RNA. Back in the day when you and I were studying biology in school we were taught that all RNA’s coded for proteins.  As a result of the Human Genome Project and the more recent ENCODE study we now know that there are bunch of different RNA molecule classes that are involved in signaling, genomic rearrangement, and even paracrine and endocrine like activities (this is basically where they go from one cell to another and exert an influence on that cell almost like a hormone!).

This may not sound like much but it’s on the same level of magnitude epigenetics in that it shows us two huge things: we didn’t know squat for about 50 years after we discovered DNA.

1) The human genome is a lot more “flexible” then ol’ Gregor Mendel realized. 2) Thus genetics as it was taught to most of the people reading or in my case writing this blog was far from accurate or complete.

I guess it just sounds cooler if you call it “dark matter”!

I always think of this when I hear some professor or doctor saying they know something is right or wrong with absolute certainty.  What about the dark matter doctor?!

So now we can add TERRA to the list of things that may be needed to pull telomerase to where it is needed, along with other molecules, in this case proteins with names like POT1 and TRP2. I should add that these proteins have an intimate relationship with stem cells so I am hoping the TERRA people look at stem cells next!

Maybe they will call it “light matter” there since stem cells and telomerase seem to be the very essence of human rejuvenation.

Finally just so you understand that even new discoveries are subject to “business as usual” and how totally differently I think than your average telomere scientist, my thought was, “Oh good now we may have another place to work on turning on telomerase and reversing or stopping the ravages of aging.”

The researchers in the study basically said, “Oh good now we have another way to interrupt telomerase and maybe create a new anti-cancer drug that Big Pharma will pay a gigantic price for! Hurrah! Another chance for a drug company payday!”

Sadly they don’t seem to read my comments about why telomerase inhibition is a faulty strategy to stop cancer!

It is unlikely we will ever be able to prevent cancer in everyone, so I totally understand the need for cancer research. But longer telomeres need to be taken far more seriously as a cancer preventative.

People are constantly asking me where is the science that proves we can “de age”. And they usually look at me like I have 3 heads when I tell them I am on telomerase activators, high dose fish oil and recently get my own purified mesenchymal stem cells reinjected.  They scream, “There is no proof that anything you are doing is helping you!”

Well there is proof. Not as much as some people want for sure but the arrows are pointing in the direction I am going and if I am going to tell you about them, recommend them, and endorse them, then you can be damn sure I am going to DO THEM first on myself.

Why?  Because I know what the alternative looks like.  I have seen it as a doctor and a son and a brother. It’s ugly and scary and not fun.  I may be doomed to that future but I don’t think so.

Either way I am not going down without a fight and I am not going to cower or stick my head in the sand while Father Time has afternoon tea with the Grim Reaper and plays Russian Roulette with my future.

Any risk I might take is worth it, and, by the time YOU hear about it from me (because the truth is the “other guys” are not willing to put their money where their mouth is!) you can believe it’s safe.

How can I give lectures and write books blogs and articles about living a better life if I don’t practice what I preach?

Doc

TA-65 Telomerase Supplement Flash Sale HURRY!

For a limited time, on this blog only, choose any of the TA-65 options on the TA-65 item page below and I will throw in a free Telomere Edge Pack worth over $100 and a bottle of my legendary Monster Multi with Minerals valued at over $45. You must use the links from this page to get the discounts!!

One Time TA-65 Order with Bonus

If you go for the whole enchilada (sorry I just got back from Mexico) and order the high dose TA-65 option I will make it 3 Telomere Edge Packs ( a total of 6 canisters) valued at almost $400 and 3 Monster Multi’s bringing the total bonus value to well over $500! This is the most potent support package you can get!

If you subscribe to either of these options, the bonuses will keep coming each and every time we refill your order of TA-65 every 6 months. It doesn’t get any better than that!!

Subscribe to High Dose TA-65 Get THREE FREE Telomere Edge Packs and THREE bottles of Monster Multi with every order.

Subscribe to Low Dose TA-65 with Extras! Get a FREE telomere edge pack and bottle of monster multi with every order.

Now let me tell why I am doing this just now.  As I mentioned to you I am just now getting back from Mexico. I was successful in setting up a coordinated stem cell / telomerase study thanks to some fancy footwork by my friends at Life Length and Age Diagnostic Labs and ReHealth.

Of course the details of the study have to remain secret until they are published but I will share some tidbits that I think are specifically related to my TA-65 use:

1)      My most recent biologic age has “reversed” to approximately 2 years younger than my chronologic age. Remember when I started TA-65 in 2009 I was 10 years older in spite of everything else I had been doing.

2)      On a macro level my bone marrow was very cellular and fat free while that of the other test subjects had fatty infiltration consistent with aging. The bone marrow is where the specific type of stem cells we are testing live. To have “young looking marrow” at my age is a great thing.

3)      Consistent with #2, I had by far the densest ( though still within normal limits!) PMN count ( active immune cells) of all the samples taken even though some of the participants were several years younger than I.

4)      We did do another Life Length assay although I just had one back in May so I do not expect a whole lot of changes in that short a period of time but I would not be surpised if it’s even better,  I will know in 6 weeks or so.

The best thing is I continue to feel younger and younger and everyone comments on how much energy I have compared to a few years back. Let me tell you it’s a great thing.

Now you can be on the exact regimen I use on a daily basis and save a bunch of money in the process. Learn more about TA-65 here (but remember to order from this page for the bonus!)

After 4 years of mostly continuous use I am still as excited about TA-65 as the day I started… and I am getting some very objective proof that it has helped me grow younger!

Subscribe to High Dose TA-65 Get THREE FREE Telomere Edge Packs and THREE bottles of Monster Multi with every order.

Subscribe to Low Dose TA-65 with Extras! Get a FREE telomere edge pack and bottle of monster multi with every order.

Doc

PS If you remember the contest we launched in May I promised you I would start doing research. A few short months later I am doing exactly that and I can tell you what I find will benefit you personally. Thanks for your support and remember the contest because we are going to blast off with another one soon!

Good News Doesn’t Sell! Researchers Claim Fish Oil for Memory is Bunk

I can’t start this blog without at least calling your attention on more time to July’s “Fish oil Associated with Prostate Cancer” study. At the time I refuted that study on every level while everyone else was cowering in fear.

I am about to do it again with another big highly touted study that “Has people questioning the value of Omega 3 supplementation for Health”.

Some bullet points are in order from my past blogs as well.

1)     There is a clear cut tendency to publish “loud” contrarian headlines in the media these days especially on the internet. Let’s face it if they just keep telling you what you already know, you are not going to read anything else there and that means no responses to ads and no money for advertising agencies and merchants. Don’t believe me? If you still watch TV try to find any channel that shows “good news”!

2)     There is a clear cut tendency to bash fish oil in exactly the same way. Once again I guess people realized good news doesn’t sell. But if you actually get the news alerts, there has been a ton of good news for Omega 3 and health all through this year. It is just not getting the attention. This includes some of the very same people who jumped on the “Fish oil No Good for…” bandwagon turning coat and saying the opposite in their blogs and news broadcasts. Once again I have to chide my colleagues in medicine for being lazy ignorant and easily cowed by public opinion. Keep in mind Science does not generate that opinion, marketers do!

3)     I have been very clear in my critiques of the studies showing negative results because the conclusions are not justified by those results. Keep in mind finding “no benefit” is far different that “causing harm”! The one exception was the prostate cancer study which directed you to avoid Omega 3’s and eat more Omega 6’s. This is clearly harmful and dangerous advice. This came from the National Cancer Institute. I cannot for the life of me understand why the NCI would want to increase YOUR risk of cancer but that is exactly what following the advice from that study will do in my opinion.

4)     The usual issues are the lack of Omega 3 levels, the lack of ongoing Omega 3 monitoring, the lack of attainment of meaningful levels and conclusions that don’t make sense based on the results.

The current “Fish oil no good for…” study suffers from a number of them and its business as usual, or should I say “science as usual” on a bunch of levels.

The data derive from a highly respected large study that was run over many years to determine the effects of standard medical therapy on women’s health. That study is called the Women’s Health Initiative. I could go into great detail about the major findings of that study here but let me spell it out for you in simple terms.

Hormone replacement therapy as practiced as standard of care in the allopathic medical community for several decades greatly increased the risk of heart attack, stroke, urinary incontinence, breast cancer, and blood clots and may decrease the risk of colon cancer and bone loss.

Two things that were swept under the run in these conclusions were: the commercial estrogens used have little resemblance to human estrogens. In fact they are made from horse pee which contains over 20 different estrogenic compounds that are very different than human estrogens. Some of those compounds have not yet been chemically identified, characterized or thoroughly investigated for their properties in humans. Secondly they did say much about who was responsible for this. Drug companies and doctors.

Speaking of Drug Companies the largest manufacturer of estrogen products, Wyeth saw its profits drop dramatically after the findings of the WHI study implicated Premarin and Provera on such a wide scale. Subsequently they filed a “citizen’s petition” against the use of bio identical hormone therapy and the FDA has jumped on board citing “lack of scientific evidence” that bio identical therapy is different or better. This is true if you restrict your scientific evidence to only U.S, based studies. Not so if you read European and other literature where there is more widespread use of bio identical hormones and less drug company dominance.

Also is anyone else wondering how a drug company can be considered a “citizen”? Only in America!

The short version of the WHI findings is that they are made for TV and the internet. In other words they are ALL BAD NEWS without one shred of hope for anything that was studied. Score one for modern medicine huh?!

With that in mind let’s look today’s topic, the sub group analysis of this wonderful study done years after it was terminated found about Omega 3 levels. Yes that is right, The WHI is long dead, but there must have been some blood hanging around frozen. I am not an expert in blood storage but the WHI started in 1991 and ended 15 years later in 2006- 7 years ago. I have to wonder about the validity of using 7 year old blood to draw widespread conclusions but as I said I am not an expert in that. The authors do freely disclose “accidental thawing” of the samples allowing a temperature rise of 108 degrees Farenheit for over 2 weeks and then back tracking to do a study to show the effects of their mistake.

Here is what they said about that:  “Results from these experiments were used to develop             regression calibration equations and estimate subjects’ predegradation. “  Did you get all that!? Ok so just so you know the samples were supposed to be stored at -112F and they were allowed to approach 0 for over 2 weeks.

Next, the actual time from the single sample they drew to the first “brain” test was a median of 3 years

Ok enough of bashing their design and execution, back to the study findings: In a reasonably large group of women (well over 2000) the researchers from the University of Iowa found that increasing Omega 3 levels in older women did nothing to statistically alter a woman’s ability to think. Firstly notice it did not say it made them worse, it said there was no effect. Does that really get translated well with: Fish oil no good for…” internet headlines?

Or do you immediately think something “bad” when you read the words “NO GOOD!”

Next there was no attempt or mention of supplementation or dietary habits at all.

As a matter of fact the conclusion was drawn from a SINGLE blood measurement of Omega 3 content (in RBC membranes) This is almost exactly the way I have used the Ideal Omega test until Sept. 1 before the Government decided it needs to be regulated-effectively removing it from internet distribution!.

So from a single blood test done once with no follow up, the conclusions were drawn after 6 years. Anyone else think that is fishy?  It seems to me that people’s Omega 3 levels are very much variable and need to be rechecked at least 2X a year depending on diet, supplementation, activity level, and stressors.

But wait there is more and here is where the science gets even more confusing and fishy!

The women were stratified into 4 “tertiles” according to their Omega 3 levels. So I decided to look at those levels and see what they actually meant.

For those of you who attended either of the 2 free omega 3 teleseminars you will really understand this since it relates to the values we (you and I) were able to get from those Ideal Omega test kits I can no longer sell!

In the WHI study the “High” group of omega 3 had the equivalent of 34% omega3 and 66% Omega 6. In other words they were floridly Omega 3 deficient and Omega 6 dominant the only time they were sampled.

So using the criteria the researchers were allowed to use to draw their conclusions I am allowed to draw this one: The WHI study shows that a population of elderly women who at their very best have a very low level of Omega 3 in their blood and are therefore Omega 6 dominant get no benefit from their lack of Omega 3!

Come on people! It’s not rocket science. If you are Omega 3 deficient you cannot expect to be healthier than the rest of the population which is also Omega 3 deficient.

Keep in mind these people where the “Best” of the bunch.  I shudder to think what the lowest tertile looked like.

As a matter of fact I have a challenge for the folks at the University of Iowa. Go back and look at overall morbidity and mortality from vascular disease and cancer. I would bet that even the low Omega levels seen in the “best” or “highest” group were protective against some of these age related diseases compared to the lowest group.

So what is the final conclusion? If you are going to bother to pay attention to your Omega 3 levels and I think you should since they are probably the most predictive of what is going to happen to you overall, then eat, or supplement to a level that actually means something. What is “high dose”?

High Dose to me is above the level where our ancestors routinely ran and where the hunter gatherer/fisher populations that have a fraction of our Western diseases run today. That would mean Higher than 70% omega 3 and 30% Omega 6- exactly the opposite values of the “high” group in this study.

I do want to give one Neurologist in particular a lot of credit for telling it like it is.

Peter Whitehouse MD said, “You cannot conclude from this study that having omega-3 in your diet is not important for your brain health and for your body health as well. They are important for practically all aspects of body health particularly heart – it may also affect other things like risk for cancers,”

Dr. Whitehouse has no doubt read all the “Fish oil no good for…” studies as well and is not duped by bad science.

In defense of the researchers at the University of Iowa who released this study, they are not making any wild negative conclusions either and are simply reporting the data on what is at best a poorly designed study with several potential error sources.

They did their job- they got published in a major journal. You can infer a lot about the quality of the journal by the studies it publishes but again no one is making those associations.

They are also not telling you what I just told you which are massively important!

They are doing their job and I am doing mine-educating you!

Stay tuned because there is a lot more fun interesting and POSITIVE stuff you can learn to help yourself stay young and healthy!

Doc

Reference:

Neurology Sept 25, 2013

Omega-3 fatty acids and domain-specific

Cognitive aging

Secondary analyses of data from WHISCA

Eric M. Ammann, MS

James V. Pottala, PhD

William S. Harris, PhD

Mark A. Espeland, PhD

Robert Wallace, MD,

MSc

Natalie L. Denburg, PhD

Ryan M. Carnahan,

PharmD, MS

Jennifer G. Robinson,

MD, MPH

A brief blog about my blog!

The word press blog has become very popular and I have a lot of regular fans and of course some regular detractors.  This is the Yin and Yang of life.

But recently I got an email accusing me of being a “Johnny Come Lately”. Now normally I shrug this stuff off but I have to admit this comment got a little bit under my skin.

The accusation was based on the “fact” that I have only been blogging since 2010 after our book “The Immortality Edge came out. You’ll notice I did not put the customary Amazon link there because Amazon has sold out of our book! You can still get it through them just not from them at the moment.

I expect and hope they’ll order more!

Anyway I thought I would remind some of you who doubt, I have been blogging a long long time on lots of different things. Here is a link to the old Blog Spot blog which spans pretty much of the past decade.

I would also inform those of you who think I am a newbie that what has to have been the very first anti-aging Podcast was recorded by us and published by the long since gobbled up “Podcast Alley” in 2005. It’s out there somewhere I just don’t know where!

That begs the question: why the gap between blogs and other forms of communication.

Frankly I was spending a lot of time and not getting a lot of feedback. It is totally different now- I still spend the time but at least I know people are reading and responding.

Here is my guess: as usual I was ahead of my time! LOL.

These forms of communication simply did not hit mainstream readership for a couple of years after I started and I guess I just figured they never would.

I was certainly wrong about that!

Thanks for your support and engagement. I think you know most of what you read here is not to be found elsewhere. You can always get a parroted back version of what some press release or article said, examples being the fish oil and prostate cancer thing and of course the recent Ornish article.

But if you want thoughtful commentary, you’ve come to the right place.

Speaking of thoughtful check out the old blog when you get a chance. There is some provocative and amusing stuff back there!

 

 

Doc

Cancer and Telomerase Part 6

I am not going to rehash all of the things I have said about telomerase activation and cancer in the past because there is too much new stuff to tell you about.

But I will remind you that cancer has a nasty and unique ability to amplify telomerase expression in just about every way you could imagine, recombination, gene amplification, mutation and more. This is “cancer’s fault”! It does not mean that telomerase causes cancer as I have said a thousand different ways and a thousand different times.

I will also remind you that this has absolutely nothing to do with TA-65!

Currently studies from Maria Blasco’s lab suggest that we can amplify telomerase more or less continuously for at least a year at a 10 fold level without increasing the incidence of cancer. That particular study showed a 25% increase in the life span of middle aged subjects (mice) and 13% in geriatric mice that were basically already hitting their maximum life span. Remember Dr Blasco disabused the world of a myth- that mice do not age like people e.g. they do not age by telomere loss. That in fact is not true as she showed- they DO age by telomere loss specifically the accumulation of higher and higher percentages of short telomeres.

Her studies were ground breaking because they showed mice as ideal models for human aging surrogates and, that telomerase activation was the only current way to extent life span in mammals.

This came in the wake of the calorie restriction studies in monkeys being shown as flawed which ultimately undermined the stance that CR works in mammals at least for the moment. And of course there was the DePinho study where mouse aging was actually reversed by telomerase activation.

Because Dr DePinho used a common trigger, the drug tamoxifen as the off on switch some anti-aging docs wrongly interpreted this to mean that bioidentical hormone replacement lengthens your telomeres. There is not one study that shows that although there are lots of reasons to consider hormone replacement! Same thing for men and testosterone.

Earlier( 2010) there was the peer reviewed TA-65 study in Rejuvenation Research which showed multiple improvements in health parameters in real live free living people, and as I have mentioned before there is a study that was started this past May in Barcelona which is randomized double blinded placebo controlled in people taking TA-65.

There is some interesting research though on telomerase and cancer, sort of. By sort of I mean that it is not directly relating to telomerase but to cancer.

First a study identified the specific region or “protein motif” where telomerase binds to the telomere. This is for all intents and purposes the “gate keeper” portion of telomerase that allows it to bind directly to the telomere and start making it longer. Of course the first words out of the researchers mouths had to do with the Big Pharma payday they expect to get if they can exploit this by “making a drug that might inhibit cancer”.

I will say this much: That drug better be very very specifically targeted to cancer cells only or its going to play havoc with the rest of the immune system and the stem cell population. Geron’s drug Imetelstat while brilliantly conceived by some very smart people has not panned out and actually looked like it made the cancer worse. Now a lot of this may have been due to poor patient selection when choosing who got the treatment but the sad fact is cancer figures out lots of ways to tenaciously survive these kinds of things while non cancerous normal cells do not. I stand by my original statements: non targeted telomerase inhibition is a bad idea!

The good news is that it (the  telomerase binding domain) can be used in the reverse and when the enough momentum and public desire for anti-aging telomerase activation happens and the profit margin gets big enough without the financial risk ( in other words when someone else does the hard work) Big Pharma will surely swoop in and capitalize. Then we will have the world’s first telomerase activating drug. Unless Google’s new anti-aging company beats them to it!

Another thing that you may be aware of is that some viruses cause cancer.  Recently an inherited Herpes Virus (HHV6A +B) was found to integrate into the telomere. When it “comes out” it apparently destabilizes the telomere and the rest of the genome and at the very least shortens the life span of the affected cells.

This is the first time I have ever seen documentation of a specific virus integrate directly into telomere DNA which is very different than the rest of the genome where other viruses often hide. While no one is sure what this means and there is not a direct relationship to cancer, there is a spectrum of associations of HHV6 with childhood Roseola or “6^th disease” being the most common. There is speculation about Chronic Fatigue and MS as well.

The bottom line is something you already knew: destruction of telomeres and shortening thereof can have serious consequences.  Sickness aging and death are among them!

That is why I am constantly harping on you to “Take Care of Your Telomeres!”

Doc

Citation: Michael Harkisheimer, Mark Mason, Elena Shuvaeva, Emmanuel Skordalakes, ‘A Motif in the Vertebrate Telomerase N-Terminal Linker of TERT Contributes to RNA Binding and Telomerase Activity and Processivity’, Structure September 19 2013 DOI:10.1016/j.str.2013.08.013

Are You Neurotic? Be Careful!

Ok you’ve seen me beat up on the QPCR as a tool for accurate assessment of telomere length in the recent Ornish study. To my mind that was the absolute worst use of that technology and it invalidates much of what the authors concluded primarily because the study was so small and did not correlate well with telomerase activity. If you haven’t read that blog it’s here .

But another recent study that used this technology was exactly the kind where QPCR might actually be useful… sort of. You’ll see why I am qualifying it.

Keep in mind as you read this that the vagaries of these studies are not even in the consciousness of the people writing about them. They just look at the study and parrot back the conclusions as if they were fact. Apparently most people want exactly that with very little consideration for “the truth” because if the study supports their agenda, they are not going to want to hear anything that raises questions. Again if you read my blog on the Ornish study you will see that is not my way either.

Now onto this new study out of Holland. The gist of it is: if you are significantly neurotic you are shortening your telomeres and probably your lifespan and your health span more rapidly than you should be and more rapidly than someone who is better emotionally balanced!

This study had all the things the “Ornish” study did not. It had an “n” of over 3300 people. It used the telomere measurement over long periods of time between measurements, 1, 3, and 6 years. The combination of the large number of participants and the long delay between assays especially the 3 and 6 year gaps helps make up for some of the inaccuracies in this kind of test because the numbers give it more ability to predict trends and the time gives more chance for REAL changes in telomere length that are within the detection of the tests ability to actually happen. To the statisticians in the audience you know I just simplified the heck out of that explanation but most of the folks reading this will understand it and would not get the terminology you like to use!

Now would have HTQFISH been a better choice? Absolutely! It would have actually looked at the telomeres and seen the percentage of short telomeres as well as mean telomere length.  And it would have delivered the data in almost exactly the same time frame with more accuracy allowing the authors to have a shorter and potentially cheaper cost to the study while giving more information.

Why didn’t they do that instead? I can only guess but they weren’t looking for individual information only large group and mostly because scientists have not caught on yet to this technology!  You can experience it yourself if you want to at ADL Tests.

Now comes the critique part of the study e.g. what is wrong with it. Mainly that they had to use a questionnaire to access neuroticism. Questionnaires are a necessary evil in things like nutrition, exercise/injury study and psychiatry but they are fraught with potential errors mainly because people don’t always tell the truth when they talk about themselves!

Still if you look at some of the better studies that Epel and Blackburn have done in the past it fits with the findings. Mental stress whether self inflicted or related to “the others” in one’s life shortens our lives and can wreck our health almost as surely as some physical disease.

So what can you do if you are stressed, neurotic or carrying around harmful mental wounds?

Well you can start by forgiving yourself and valuing yourself. Then you can forgive and value others!

In the process you might read our little book The Immortality Edge – but hurry even Amazon is running out of them! You will find there several ways to achieve physical and mental balance that have worked for many people. Some are expensive (TA 65) and some cost nothing.

Only YOU can decide how much you are worth!

 

Doc

Great stuff about Telomeres in the news this week

You may have already heard about the follow up to the original Dean Ornish/Liz Blackburn study done 5 years ago.

If you missed the boat this Southern California duo of famous people did a small study using a dietary modification to measure telomerase activation in peripheral white blood cells- the ones we usually look at for telomere length.

They found that telomerase activity increased in those people who adhered to both the diet and life style changes which included a vegetable rich diet and meditation. Recently after waiting 5 years to see what developed they got as many people from the original study back as they could and this time looked at telomere length, which they reported as “relatively increased” in the group of 10 men that were still adherent versus the 25 that were not practicing their interventions.

As an aside these men had low grade prostate cancer. There is no reason to suspect that healthy interventions in this group could not directly translate into meaningful results for completely healthy men and women.

This has been interpreted as “diet and lifestyle changes can increase telomere length”. Sadly that is a bit of big jump. Trust me I want to believe it because it represents the bulk of what we wrote about 3 years ago in The Immortality Edge. But as authors of the study plainly state: this is a pilot study and requires confirmation with larger randomized placebo controlled studies.

The best things that can be gotten from this study are:

1) Eating healthy is likely to make you more healthy and might make you live a little longer.

2) The findings are compelling enough even if there are serious flaws that maybe just maybe enough funds can be generated to do the bigger studies that would prove or disprove the effects on telomeres.

Now comes the part you don’t really want to hear: the limitations of the study.

1)      It is really tiny with only 10 people who are able to be included in the intervention group.

2)      The measurement of telomere signal ( notice I did not say length because as you’ll see they did not measure length) using the QPCR test, while still considered valid by some , has huge inaccuracies especially in a tiny population and for better or worse looks at “emission of signal” as a surrogate measurement for telomere length. It does not measure the actual telomere length in kilo bases as do the FloFISH and the gold standard in my opinion the HTQFISH.  I give them credit for waiting 5 years to compare the analysis but in my opinion the number of people in this study is far far too small to really say anything about telomere length.

3)      Lifestyle changes including meditation, diet and exercise have a tendency to increase the number peripheral cells with longer telomeres versus those with shorter telomeres skewing the average measurement towards “longer than before the lifestyle changes”. This does not mean that the cells have longer telomeres than they did 5 years ago. It means there are more of them around with longer telomeres to be measured. Complicated as that sounds it’s a pretty big difference and cannot be accounted for by the technology they used.

4)      The QPCR measurement ignores individual telomere length on individual chromosomes.  It is an average measurement of all of them and does not look at critically short telomeres. While an argument rages between people whose agendas are directed at selling different kinds of tests, and not everyone agrees that the percentage of short telomeres is all that important, the percentage of short telomeres is what drives the aging and disease processes. This can only be measured by using the Life length assay. I can also tell you that hell will freeze over before all the scientists in the field accept this as fact and accept the new assay as the gold standard for all kinds of reasons which have nothing to do with science!

Finally there have been a few comments from the “anti-TA-65” gallery stating that this study proves what TA Sciences have never proven- that they can turn on telomerase in people. While I understand the criticism and have information that for the same reasons as the last sentence in #4 will likely not become public for a long time I can tell you that I have done everything in the Immortality Edge for at least the past 5 years and until I started taking TA-65 on a daily basis my telomere length just got shorter and shorter. Since I have started it they have gotten progressively longer (reduced percentage of short telomere s and mean telomere length) as have those of most of the people I have on TA-65 who have been tested.

Understand this is not a study, it is my observation. There is a study going on now that will prove exactly what I just said but the results will not be published until 2015 at this rate. That is the way science works.

We do not yet honestly know the effects of TA-65 on a large diverse population. We only know that in the study published in Rejuvenation Research in 2010 clinical end points like blood pressure, insulin and glucose, inflammatory markers, and immune system function all improved. Frankly that may be even more important than telomere length since it represents what all of us are looking for first- better health. Those end points were not (yet) measured in the Ornish study although it should be easy enough to do.

We do know for sure that eating better makes us healthier and probably if we have a chronic disease like prostate cancer may add some years to our lives. But we also know from all of human history you cannot eat your way to truly long life. Adele Davis would have to agree with me rest her soul!

We similarly don’t know if TA-65 alone will change the future of longevity and health span in humans although the very preliminary evidence is just as intriguing as the findings of the Ornish study.

I stand by what we said in The Immortality Edge 3 years ago- if you can do BOTH.

Best,

Dr Dave

The Immortality Edge- wrong then but right now!?

I recently heard one of the most amusing criticisms of my work and our book “The Immortality Edge”

A dear friend of mine who finally after 3 years of watching and waiting decided to bite the bullet and start TA-65 told me about this last week. He lives in South Florida an area that is rich with famous anti-aging doctors. During a conversation with one of the more famous of our breed and a name you would recognize if I told you he related my work, the book and his decision to go on TA-65 to this famous anti-aging doctor. He made the “mistake” of adding how far ahead of my time I was in this area.

The response of the doctor was, “Well he’s right now but he was wrong then!”

Think about that for a moment. It pretty much summarizes the attitude of a lot of people when it comes to telomerase therapy and research. Basically I am being chastised for being ahead of my time and not waiting until everyone else jumped on board and said it was OK. I am being scolded for being at the cutting edge instead of on the caboose. Maybe just maybe there is a little jealousy there, who knows, who cares.

If you look at our Amazon reviews you will see one very active one from a reviewer who said I was “speculative”. Now that everything I have said has been borne out to be true and telomerase therapy seems to be the only current valid way of extending mammalian life span do you think this individual would write back and say, “Ok you were right!”? Not a chance!

Not even a “Well you are right now but you were wrong then!” Even that requires too much effort attention and follow up in this leave your opinion and forget about it world. The problem is the leaving of the opinion seems more important to most people than the actual facts and the chance to learn something.

Honestly I don’t really expect my colleagues who fight with me to change their opinion. They are fighting with their egos not their brains and it does me no good to waste the energy. I just tell it like I see and give as many reasons why I see it that way and you have to decide.

So the rest of this blog will be a synopsis of some of the more recent things you might want to know.

A reasonably large study from the University of Utah recently added yet another link between telomere length and longevity specifically,

“Shorter telomeres were linked to a threefold increase in the risk of death from heart disease, and an eightfold increase in the risk of death from infection. It looks as if telomere length is a key predictor of survival in humans, as a marker of aging and age-related disease” courtesy of Telemanagement.com.

While the site mistakenly says this is the first time human longevity has been linked to telomere length it does cite another “brick in the wall” so to speak for telomeres and healthspan/lifespan.

Some of you probably have already seen the testimonial for TA-65 from Men’s Journal. Miami tight end Dustin Keller “claimed that TA-65 gave him immense improvements in his physical performance, including a beefed up immune system as well as shorter recovery times.”

Those of you who remember my long ago blog about how TA-65 improved my running so much and so fast from 4 years ago will understand this is exactly what we’d expect to see.  Bill Andrews super telomere scientist and head of the team that identified the human telomerase gene while at Geron was transformed from a back of the pack runner to a leader in his age group in short order.

I would venture that none of the three of us, me Andrews or Keller have had a cold as long as we’ve been on TA-65.

And then there was the ultra marathon runner study that should telomere lengths in these people equivalent to 5 years longer lifespan. Now that study is not conclusive in my book because it used the often inaccurate QPCR technique to measure telomere length and did not measure the true biologic age of the runners via the Life length assay.

But it was certainly suggestive.

And then of course there was the now famous Farzeneh-Farr Blackburn study that came out 2 years after my supplement chapter in The Immortality Edge made statements about the protective effect of fish oil on telomeres based on my own research with Bill Andrew’s Sierra Sciences lab.

Let’s not forget the JAMA article that happened well after the book was written and right about the time it was published where my comments about the protective effects of telomerase and long telomeres and cancer were bolstered when the study found a link between short telomere length and severity and incidence of numerous cancers.

The effects of stress smoking and obesity all detailed in the book have also been proven on several occasions.

The there were several studies by Maria Blasco showing the validity of the mouse model for human aging, extension of mammalian lifespan by as much as 25% and the significant improvement of healthspan by TA-65 with no increase in cancer in any of these studies were telomerase was turned on.

So pretty much everything we said in the book has come to pass as true.

And what have I been up to since then?

Three new products just this past year including Ultra 85 Fish Oil, RG cell stem cell activating cream, and the newly formulated Telomere Edge Packs.

Then there are the 2 new books I have been researching, and the many trips to Madrid to see super scientist Maria Blasco that have been part of that.

My next foray is to tie the knot between stem cells and telomerase as tightly as I can and help you be able to do something unique about it. In the process I will as always be the guinea pig so you don’t have to!

I may be wrong about it now but chances are I will be right about it in a few years!

In the meantime all the work research and standing behind TA-65 when few others were is making me look pretty good right now. As a matter of fact I have biologically “deaged” 7 years since I started TA-65 using the Life Length Assay as documentation.

This is the only test I will trust for any future telomere testing for myself and any individual who is following their therapy and/or telomere length.

As always you’ll hear of my adventures first hand and in most cases you’ll have the chance to do the same things I did if you want, once I have vetted everything out.

Finally you need to know something about me: I am not that smart. But I have really smart friends that I need to thank. They include Mike Fossel, Cal Harley, Greta Blackburn, Maria Blasco, Jerry Shay, Bill Lands, Joe Raffaele. JC Santana and Rafael Gonzalez all of whom help me stay on the cutting edge of what matters to you and me: staying young and staying healthy.

Doc

Statins and Human Aging- Big Pharma Jumps on Board?

A recent study out of Italy links statin drugs to increased telomerase activity and slower shortening of telomeres.

If you read my blogs you know this is not the first time such an association has been found.  Back in March of this year I reviewed another article predicting we would see more of this. And now we have!

The gist of this study is that statins appear to have a mild effect on white blood cell telomerase activity. They do not lengthen telomeres but they could be put into the broad category of “things that slow down telomere loss”.

The authors make a rather prophetic remark in that they suggest that some of the increased survival that may be seen with statin therapy may be due to improved stabilization of the telomere. They do not go so far as to say that ALL of it may be due to this. They also still mention the cholesterol lowering effect of statins as a survival mechanism.

Let’s look at that a bit more.  Statin drug therapy started when Merck took the “active” molecule from red yeast rice and patented as Mevacor. This first statin drug was much like TA-65 in that it was all natural- a small molecule purified and concentrated that came from a Chinese plant!

Soon after “semi-synthetic” statins arrived and Rosuvastatin or Crestor tm represents the new generation of totally synthetic computer generated molecules. In the process an industry and test was created to support Big Pharma to the tune of $20 billion a year.

In spite of all of this the drug companies are still having to do studies that “justify the use of statins”. As a matter of fact the JUPITER study was done a few years back providing highly funded and perfectly credentialed evidence ( American Journal of Cardiology and researchers from Mass General aka the New England Journal of Medicine folks) that basically everyone on the planet should get a statin drug.

Of course the facts are not all that clear cut. Statins are costly, have a very high cost per prevention of second heart attack let alone first, work mostly in high risk men, don’t work well in women, have side effects profiles that include memory loss, impotence, diabetes, and have failed to provide the much vaunted anti-cancer and anti-Alzheimer’s benefits Big Pharma was hoping for.

Simply put if we applied the same standards to statin use as we did to mammograms, pap smears and PSA for prostate cancer we would not be using statins because they are too costly. And yet they are still much beloved by allopathic doctors like me and almost universally recommended. They even feature heavily on the Cardiology section of the Internal Medicine Boards!

I think you get the picture. Statins are too big and too profitable to be gone anytime soon. But this whole association between statins and telomeres does have a very positive side. Sort of.

If Big Pharma gets involved in the anti-aging market things will move much faster. Then again they will own it which is not necessarily a good thing for all of us. Then again it may not be preventable.

My friend what you are really watching hear is a “product cycle” in development. The association between a drug company drug and the anti-aging market will blossom when enough people like me have done enough work and educated enough people to support the desire in Big Pharma to capitalize on the market need and desire that has been created. Then when the social moral and economic risks are the lowest, and someone else has incurred the cost and risk of developing the answer, Big Pharma will swoop in, use their gigantic advertising resources to saturate the market, buy off the actual pioneers in the industry ( don’t worry they won’t pick me! I am far too controversial!) and be the hero of all humanity thus cementing our dependency on them forever more. Or so they hope.

The truly good thing is that telomeres and the association of telomeres with disease and disease prevention and treatment will become a real thing with a real agenda instead of just a fascinating research tool like it is now. Finally the field will get some of its due even if there is a terrible price to pay.

So here is some food for thought. If you are on TA-65 or the Telomere Edge Pack you are actually in the fringe-pioneer group that is forging the new future for humanity RIGHT NOW.

While we cannot link TA-65 to disease prevention just yet it is a real possibility in the not too distant future. Remember it is the only compound on the market that actually has real human data.

This brings up another point. TA Sciences had the foresight to use the Life Length assay before it was even commercially available. Unlike the Italian study just released which used the inaccurate Q-PCR assay to measure people’s telomeres (which makes the data suspect in the first place!) their data is real, repeatable and in the process of being expanded as we speak.

The Life Length test is the ONLY test that can give you an accurate biologic age.

And I have to be honest. For a lot of people only drugs will do. This is true of most doctors who do not understand how severely and tactically they have been marketed to become the mouth pieces of the pharmaceutical industry.

But for guys like me- I feel a lot safer and better about using an all natural product that I have proven in repeated personal testing using the Life Length Assay has reversed my biologic age by 7 years.

So the only question is: are you a pioneer?!

 

Doc

 

 

PS as an aside my telomere research buddies tell me that statins may actually work better in people who have shorter telomeres because they may have a more demonstrable effect on their telomeres. This means that Big Pharma could and should do some stratification work on their respective statin drugs to see who will benefit most. This will cost money and reduce the risk of statins so don’t look for it any time soon!

 

 

References:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002914905020321

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002914905020321

Ninety Year old Joints- JRA and telomere length

Awhile back I sustained an injury that made me feel like I was 90. In spite of all the training supplements and coaching I have done and given I succumbed to a moment of weakness and “went for it” when I knew I should not have. The result was a several torn muscles in the hip and groin area euphemistically known as a “sports hernia”. The injury itself fell right in between the “surgery versus no surgery” boundaries so I elected to rehab it myself.

The rehab was slow and painful and I distinctly remember thinking, “This must be what it’s like to be 90 years old” because for a few weeks every step was painful and every step felt unstable. While I would have preferred to listen to my common sense and not sustain an injury there was an “up” side.

I began to look at what really matters to people who are getting older: the ability to ambulate bipedally e.g. walk! While I still run and work out I now do it from the “what is really healthy” for me perspective. I want to be able to walk stably and far in my 90’s. Running will be a bit less important for me then I suspect.

There is a disease called Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis JRA for short that affects 1 out of every 1000 kids in this country. It is classified as “auto immune” which means these kids are attacking their own joints.

The immune cells in these children are the culprit. As a result of being turned on and immensely over stimulated they are shortening their telomeres at a rate unheard of in normal aging. Simply put the immune cells in these children look like those of adults with rheumatoid arthritis who are 90 years old.  Researchers have now identified premature aging of the immune cells as one of the drivers of this disease apart from strict auto immunity. This opens up potentially new treatments and a huge leap in the understanding of this disease, adult rheumatoid arthritis and even garden variety degenerative joint disease.

One thing is for sure. Different tissues in the human body age different rates. Which part of your body ages depends on genetic makeup, epigenetic makeup much of which may be under your control, and finally environmental factors? The last thing, environmental factors, usually conjures up images of secret hidden toxic pollutants in the food chain or the air and water, but it is far more likely to be things like stress at work, home or lack of sleep.

Take care of your telomeres!

You won’t like how 90 feels if you don’t!

Doc

All this time I’ve been lying to you!

OK it’s time to come clean. And now that I’ve died and become a disembodied spirit because of my long term consumption of high dose fish oil. I thought I may as well confess another lie to you.

Ultra 85 is really not fish oil.  Technically at least. You see “real fish oil” as it comes from the fish contains only about 30% EPA and DHA which are really the only known relevant Omega 3 fatty acids. The rest of fish oil is other fatty acids including in the case of Tilapia and most farm raised fish, a significant amount of Omega 6 inflammatory fatty acid and a lot of other non essential fats that are used for calories.

But because highly purified highly concentrated Omega 3’s are not exactly what is found in fish a better term for Ultra 85 would be “highly concentrated EPA and DHA”.

I think you’ll forgive me, “fish oil” just sounds better.

And yet there are some other differences that need to be clarified because there is so much bad information out there as witnessed by the whole “fish oil and prostate cancer” nonsense I wrote about recently.

But first the disclaimer: I make and take fish oil in what most people would consider large doses. I use the dose I need to keep my Omega 3 levels in the 60+ % range because this is the range that populations that age well and have the lowest incidence of heart disease and cancer  have. I measure my levels every couple of months with the Ideal Omega test.

Much of what I am going to tell you is contrary to what you will read and even hear from so called experts. It especially contradicts the “just eat fish” and/or “natural triglyceride” stuff. As always I will give scientific reasons to prove my point.

1)      The first thing you need to understand is something I have already told you: Fish are not magical. If there is any magic to be had it comes from EPA and DHA the actual essential fats that fish provide. Fish do have Vitamin D and protein all of which is good, but from the standpoint of fatty acid biology, EPA and DHA is where its at!

2)      The ratio of anti-inflammatory Omega 3 fats to Inflammatory Omega 6 is the main source of inflammation in your body.  While not the only source of free radicals and inflammation it should come as no surprise that these things which either part of your diet or not are the biggest things you can do to fix or increase damage.  Because most people eat everyday several times a day this is the biggest most important way to control your “inflammation stat” which ultimately is the biggest thing that determines your long term health.

3)      Omega 3 fats are oxidized in the body. This is a normal natural thing and your body is able to handle it provided:  a) you have enough intact Omega 3’s in your diet to replace the oxidized ones and b) Your Omega 6 levels are not too high. Most people in this country are 3X higher than they should be with Omega 6.

4)      Said another way #3 means the Omega 6 levels in your body reflect the degree of damage oxidized Omega 3 can do to you. The fault is not the Omega 3 it’s the Omega 6. Don’t blame fish oil, blamed the lousy diet we eat!

5)      Natural triglyceride fish oil is not “better” for you than Ethyl Ester fish oil. Natural triglyceride fish oil is only 30% essential EPA and DHA and is often not in the proportions needed to give the main benefits of EPA and DHA. It is also unpurified and therefore contains whatever toxins are in the waters the fish is harvested from. Ethyl ester fish oil can be concentrated to contain the highest proportion of DHA and EPA and deliver it toxin free.

6)      The ultimate absorption of natural triglycerides is not “better” than Ethyl Ester. It is simply faster. The natural triglyceride fans often cite numbers like 70% absorption for their fish oil and only 21% for Ethyl Ester. This is true if you measure at one hour. They leave out several facts. The sustained slow uptake of Ethyl Ester fish oil over 24 hours provides much better protection from cardiac events as does the superior tissue recovery of Ethyl Esters in the face of ischemic events (references below)

7)      Two fish meals a week is not anywhere near enough to fix the Omega 3 Omega 6 imbalances that occur in this country and other Western nations. The various cardiology societies have defined 2 fish meals a week or at most 3 grams a day of fish oil as “enough”. They conveniently leave out any mention of optimal EPA/DHA levels because they never bother to measure them. If they did they would see that eating fish 2x a week in particular is under dosing the Omega 3’s in a big way. Even if you ate fish everyday once a day you would not get enough to fix the imbalances. Take a look at the mg in the chart below and keep in mind the average American needs at least 6000mg to fix the imbalance.

Even if you were eating a very high Omega 3 fish like salmon you would need to eat it at least 2x a day everyday and then you would be risking toxin exposure.

8)      It is indeed possible to fix this imbalance with diet alone and I am currently working on 2 separate books which will provide information on how to do that. But you are NOT going to like the food choices you have to make and you have to diligently avoid omega6’s. Sadly and simply put in this case it is just easier to take fish oil supplements! But you do have the option of drastically lowering your Omega 6’s ( hint give up all processed foods most nuts and avocados and eat lots of fish every day and hope it comes from a clean ocean!

9)      When a fish oil trial has shown benefits like cardiac protection it has used Ethyl Ester fish oil not triglyceride. As a matter of fact when the krill marketers want to try to prove superiority to fish oil they ALWAYS use a triglyceride and NEVER use Ethyl Ester fish oil. I will let you guess why.

10)   They say Ethyl Esters are not natural. This is true if you are talking about fish. But human beings normally use the Ethyl Ester form of Omega 3’s for both storage and biochemical reactions. They may not be natural to fish but they are to people!

Ultra 85 is 85 to 92% pure EPA and DHA. It is as clean and toxin free as it can be. I take at least 6 a day and have a very good Omega 3 level as a result. It tastes great, does not cause burping or reflux and if you don’t like capsules or want to give it to kids who don’t want to swallow capsules just bite in and swallow the pleasant tasting orange flavored (natural citrus rind derived!)  oil and spit the cap out!

I have covered a lot today but believe it or not there is a ton more.

Here are the take home points:

Most people in  this country will be unwilling to make the dietary changes needed to reduce Omega 6’s and increase Omega 3’s which is why I make a pure highly concentrated fish oil.

Fish and natural triglyceride oils cannot compare in clinical end points to ethyl esters, in purity to ethyl esters or in concentration. You would have to take 3X the amount of “natural triglyceride” fish oils or 18 caps a day to reach the levels you need to mimic those populations that have healthy Omega 3 levels.

Only ethyl esters can be concentrated and purified. Only ethyl esters offer sustained long slow absorption. The major cardiac trials all used ethyl esters: not krill not triglyceride.

Most of what people tell you about fish oil is a lie! Again last week’s prostate cancer debacle was a classic example

Then again I did lie to you too because ultra 85 is technically not fish oil. Its super pure highly concentrated perfectly proportioned essential omega 3’s.

I told ya fish oil just sounds better!

 

Doc

 

A Reply to an expert

I occasionally happen across expert blogs and columns by other doctors who are called on for their expertise. Recently one such physician surprisingly skipped the whole fish oil and prostate cancer nonsense and dug up another negative study” Fish oil No Good for Heart Disease” from way back in the Spring.

Now in this guy’s defense I saw a posting today from him where he actually says “We all know fish oil is good for your heart!”  Wow talk about a turn around. In less than 24 hours we have a complete reversal of point of view.

One thing you have to admit about me: I am consistent!

Here is my response to the negative comments about fish oil and heart disease.

 

Sir, I read with interest your blog conclusion that fish oil has failed to demonstrate benefit in numerous clinical trials. I wonder if you could answer the following for me concerning the Harvard study:

 

1) What was the dose of supplementation?

2) What was the format of supplementation – ethyl ester or triglyceride. It makes a difference since the actual bio active molecules EPA and DHA are found in significantly different percentages in the two different formats

3) What was the omega3/6 ration achieved in the trial

4) Was said ratio anywhere near what the epidemiologic data suggests is expected to reduce cardiac disease and stroke e.g. 60-70% omega 3 with 40 to 30% Omega 6

5) What other medications might have interfered with the effects of Omega 3’s

6) How long did these people carry the diagnosis of heart disease before they were exposed to fish oil supplementation

7) Were any follow up levels done to see if there was compliance and continuation of the supplement other than the word of the participants?

 

There has been a finger stick test(s) available cheaply with 95% accuracy compared to tissue sampling (tissue sampling not just venopuncture!) for the past 5 years at least so cost and accuracy are not an issue for any study with even minimal funding.

 

I am just guessing that the answers to the above are no or I don’t know since I saw that study and actually read it front to back and I do not recall one of those things was addressed other than the dosage which while it fits the party line recommendations was essentially too low to impact the Omega 3 content of a human body especially if it was 30% triglyceride based.

 

If this were a prescription drug and you were told it was added to see what it did to already maximal therapy in already sick people in a dose that was most likely nowhere near what was needed to have an impact and no clinical measurements were done to follow dosing/compliance of that drug would you consider that a valid study?

 

If you take the time to investigate the 2 fish meals a week recommendation and what it will actually do to Omega 3 levels you will find there is no basis for this either. Similarly if you take the time to investigate whether there are any relevant clinical end points concerning fish oil and bleeding, fish oil and immunosuppression and or immune surveillance you will also find there is no clinical human data to support those recommendations.

 

You will find Omega 3 supplementation being used to suppress Vtach, post op malnutrition, no risk with anti-platelet agents such as clopidegrel, no increased risk of bleeding complications in cardiac surgery etc. You will also find NK and cyto toxic T cell suppression which is extrapolated to mean an increased risk of infection. They leave out the fact that the average American in the study has an O3 level of 1/20 that in non diseased populations and the suppression of T cells etc is the result of restoring the normal level of inflammation in an inflamed population. You will not find any increases in infection rate. You will find a study that made headlines recently interpreted as “Fish oil could worsen High Blood Pressure” If you look at that study you will find the “scientific” basis for the myth that ethyl ester omega 3’s are not worthwhile and other formats might be. You will find that study was done with DHA only not EPA and DHA and that the warnings are based on the extrapolation of rat data to human disease. What you will not find is any comment that suggests the authors of the study researched the difference between omega 3/6 processing in omnivores (people) and herbivores (mice and rats). Similarly you will not find any mention that they consulted prior studies that showed that the metabolism of these fats in the two different species yields different ratios of eicosanoids, AA, resolvins iso prostanes and tissue stores and all of the attendant differences one would expect to find in animals that use food sources that are different from ours and have a different biochemistry attached to them than we do. You will merely find a conclusion that spread often by doctors that ethyl ester fish oil might be dangerous in people with HTN. You will also not find the conclusions of the numerous GISSI studies that showed completely different findings in studies whose n was over 15.000 each.

 

You will find the now famous and still touted Brasky study of last month equating fish oil to massive increases in prostate cancer did not answer any of the above questions either with one big exception. They did do a one-time level of Omega 3’s on the participants. The actual variation between all groups was 0.2% cancer or no cancer , aggressive or low grade, You will find the actual omega 3 level in all these people was a median of 22% which is the median for the US without supplementation. You will find in the NIH data base a study by W. E. Lands published in 2005 (Lands,  Lipids 2003 (Apr.); 38: 317–321) that shows primary prevention of heart disease starting at Omega 3 levels of 60% with similar epidemiologic data on cancer dementia auto immune diseases, depression anxiety, post-partum issues etc etc. But you will find all of medicine in this country parroting back fear based recommendations or worse, like Dr Brasky:”People need to consume more foods rich in Omega 6″!  I am not sure how much more inflamed as a society we are supposed to be. And yet you will find scores of doctors writing the following” Based on this study more work on this important question needs to be done!” More work may need to be done but it should not be based on this study unless the media now has injected their fear based reporting into the central agendas of science and medicine.

ON the fear based risk side, there is one historical anecdote to consider however. Lieutenant Robert Peary the famous Arctic explorer is reported to have said the following, “We noticed the natives (Eskimos) bleed rather profusely when shot.” So there is potential risk to high omega 3 levels at least when Arctic explorers are in the vicinity!

 

Then again who am I to question the work of the prestigious doctors at Mass General and Brigham Women’s.

 

 

Best,

Dave

Is Aging Unstoppable

Arguments continue among the best and brightest scientists concerning the question: Is aging unstoppable.

If you think about it that question has already been answered in a functional way. There are several mammalian cell lines that have been made “immortal” simply by turning on telomerase and expressing it at a higher level than normal.  Most surprising is the absence of increased cancer in many of these experiments.

We also now know that stem cell proliferation and maintenance is highly linked to telomere length, specifically the short telomeres.

If you look closely at the scientific literature the question of whether telomerase causes cancer has already been answered many times over with a fairly resounding “No-telomerase does not cause cancer!” It has been almost 8 years since a scientific paper has raised that question. Understand this is different than commentary, different than blogging, different than social media and all the other places where people get their “information” these days.

Just like there are still people who are dedicated to the notion that telomerase might cause cancer there are also people dedicated to the “Anti-Anti-Aging” agenda. This group ranges from the “We should all die to make room for the youth” to the well we might live forever but telomerase is NOT the answer crowd.

I have made my peace with the fact that there are people who feel it is “right and just” to oppose people living longer and healthier.

To the first group I say, “Put your name on a list and we’ll make sure you don’t get anything that would prolong your health span and life span- then you can die happy in the fact that you’ve made room for someone else”.

To the second group I say “well then show me what the answer is and please show me anything else that has immortalized cell lines or added life and health span to mammals.” Clearly its not mitochondria, calorie restriction or anti-oxidants.

The recent issues surrounding the failure of calorie restriction to deliver the former should be noted. Increasing health span (how long you are healthy) with increasing life span is the bailiwick of telomerase expression alone.

And if you think about it if you could be healthier while living longer why not?

Now it’s time for a couple of concepts that have been really hard for me to get across.

1)      Aging has been partially reversed in living mammals (mice) by increasing telomerase expression. In at least two separate studies (Ron DePinho and Maria Blasco) the reversals were dramatic. Additionally Dr Blasco later showed that mice are indeed a valid model for human aging shutting down the argument that, “mice don’t age by telomere loss”.  Yes they do and I have detailed that study for you in other blogs and plan to discuss it directly with Dr Blasco in the next couple of weeks again.

2)      Telomere loss is the result of 2 main things: cellular replication and direct damage that can happen pretty much any time.

Cellular replication is unstoppable and a necessary part of being alive. The only way to slow down the loss of telomere segments during replication which is always there and always chewing away at them is with aTelomerase Activator such as TA-65

The rest of the damage is environmental/lifestyle and can be slowed down by proper lifestyle choices including stress relief, exercise, nutrition and so on. But this is only going to slow the process not reverse it.

Recently I saw yet another blog that said “Fish oil leads to longer telomeres!”  By now you should know I am a huge champion of fish oil .  I would love nothing better than to see it “lengthen telomeres”. But it does not. It slows down the loss. This is huge and meaningful and wonderful but it’s not TA-65!

The problem arises because compared to the people who did not take fish oil the ones that did have “longer telomeres”.  But no one looked at their telomere length to begin with, only after the fact in the two groups. If they had they would see that concept #1- telomere loss due to cellular replication caused BOTH groups to have shorter telomeres than when they started so NO ONE actually had longer telomeres than when they started.  The fish oil group had longer telomeres than the other group at the end of the study when they were measured but still lost telomere length overall due to cellular replication.

There is no easier way to explain it!

OK so what is the bottom line?

1)      Aging can and has been stopped by telomerase activation to lengthen critically short and eventually most telomere lengths.  In this way you can stop the #1 loss- replication.

2)      TA-65 is the only compound with solid human (or actually ANY human) data showing its effects on telomere length and causing health benefits in human beings that correlate with “anti-aging” effects. TA-65 increases telomerase expression.

3)      Live organisms have had their life spans extended past what is known to be the maximum in the wild and in the lab by increased telomerase expression with no increases in cancer.

4)      Health span and health parameters parallel each other from human cell lines to mammals to human beings- with similar systems being improved including: immune, skin, brain/behavior/ inflammation/sugar handling/ fat handling

5)      Fish oil, especially fish oil, has been shown to slow telomere loss in meaningful (clinical) fashion as well as some other anti-oxidants but none have shown increased telomere length in humans. Slowing down loss is NOT THE SAME as adding length. But when you look at oxidative environments anti-oxidants and Omega 3’s can reverse some of this damage and telomerase seems to take care of the rest.

6)      With a combination of things ranging from TA-65 and Ultra 85 I have reduce my % of short telomeres by 5% and lengthened my telomeres by 600 base pairs in 4 .5 years. Nothing else could stem the tide of my ever shortening biologic time clocks.

What steps should you take to lengthen your telomeres or at least slow the loss?

Read our book the Immortality Edge if you are not already clear on what life style modifications matter.

Next get and take enough fish oil to reverse the omega 3 deficit in your body. If you are not sure where you stand then get an IdealOmega test and find out .  Yes you can also reduce your Omega 6 intake to a great extent and this will be included in both of my forthcoming books. Watch how easy it is to take the test in my demonstration on YouTube.

If you can afford TA-65 by all means do so. If not you might be interested in the new and improved Telomere Edge Packs.

If not then focus on things like Vitamin D and Co Q 10 to boost your anti-oxidant defenses.

I firmly believe that aging can be stopped in humans. I also believe that it will take baby steps first to get there and yes we are in the “baby step” age right here right now. But if you don’t take those baby steps now you may not be able to walk or run when the time comes.

Doc

Big Pharma Strikes Back

You may have wondered why all the negative supplement stuff released in the press lately. You may have wondered why something like fish oil that has thousands of positive studies and as many human studies has become the whipping boy of the media lately.

You may have wondered why all the TV and internet docs are urging you to “use caution” when supplementing even when the science shows that most supplements are infinitely safer than prescription drugs and in some cases far more effective.

You may have wondered why, like a 2 faced politician people are touting supplements out of one corner of their mouth and vilifying them out of the other. You may have wondered why the “just eat fish” has gained momentum lately in spite of the obvious and documented risks or mercury, arsenic, lead and cadmium. All this in the face of the government’s recent admission that 70% of cancers are caused by environmental toxins.

You may have seen supposedly informed doctors making comments about “the long chain fatty acids in fish are useful the short chain fatty acids in supplements are not! So eat 2 fish meals a week.”  If you’ve read my blogs and emails then you already know the ONE isolated study that suggested that was a mouse study not a human study- and mice are herbivores that process and handle Omega 3’s very differently from people. Apparently there aren’t a lot of people who know that and if they do they do not care. They would rather spread misinformation like wild fire.

Why you may ask.

Well here is the answer: money.

Big Pharma is attacking the supplement industry and they have tons more money to spend on advertising. They are also one of the 3 biggest lobbies in Washington next to insurance companies and banks both institutions that have proven totally trustworthy!

They are not stupid. They see the financial lines between money spent on drugs and supplements crossing in or around 2025 and its time for them to protect their strangle hold on your pocket book and your health.

So they attack the safety of supplementation. The implied message is: these things are potentially dangerous and should be regulated. The translation is: we want the money from the supplement industry in our pockets so we think it should be regulated to the level of prescription drugs which we control. And they have a few cases of things like ephedrine where they managed to weakly tie a death to a supplement. The thousands of deaths each year from drugs have hurt their credibility and have caused people to naturally look elsewhere for alternatives. They want to take those alternatives away.

Think I am kidding? A small relatively powerless group of pharmacists is about to either be financially castrated or eliminated entirely based on this very same premise. You may never have heard of a compounding pharmacist but they are out there serving the anti-aging community and have been for over 2 decades. Slowly but surely they are being shackled with onerous rules that in practice make it impossible for them to do what they do. All under the auspices of “unproven therapies that could be dangerous”.

Sound familiar? These same therapies are safe enough for Europeans and Asians but their science and experience does not count here. So much for globalization.

You will see more ridiculous and unfounded fear based “news” released in the coming months and years. Make no mistake it will not be good science and it will not be for the good of people. It will be to confuse and undermine your power to make decisions and take control of your own health and future.

Please educate yourself so you do not allow that to happen without a whimper. These people are very clever and they have incredible amounts of resources to throw at this “issue”.

I know this because I used to be one of them. But you and I do have something they cannot take no matter how much phony fear based nonsense they spew.

Our minds.  Don’t let them fool you!

Doc

Zombies Cowards and Fools – Doctors and the News Media

I have to tell you, I am appalled at the recent issues with the NCI study and its supposed link to fish oil and advanced prostate cancer.

I have already ridiculed the authors, but in case it was not clear, let me restate it in the clearest way possible:

I think the authors, particularly the lead author Theodore Brasky PhD, should be fired from his position and banned from publishing in general, since he is guilty of the worst kind of science. The worst kind of science is science that is flawed, draws flawed conclusions and garners undeserved attention. The worst kind of science will increase your chances of getting sick, if you follow it. The NCI study and the conclusions drawn by Dr Brasky and crew are, in my opinion, far more likely to make you sick with cancer, heart disease and other “age related” illnesses if you follow it.

If you follow it you will: stop all supplementation especially fish oil. Follow the current Big Food agenda of consuming whole grains which will increase your Omega 6 to 3 ratios, massively increase the inflammation in your body and set you up for the numerous age related diseases we still think of as normal including cancer.

If Dr Brasky follows his own advice, statistically he will wind up with a higher chance of cancer and heart disease. Worse yet, he is an epidemiologist and must know this advice cannot be healthy.

Next, I want to commend my colleagues in the medical profession, for being a bunch of cowardly wusses. In particular, I would cite the numerous “web site and TV doctors” who are hired by the media for their expertise. Their advice can be summed up as follows: Well, we don’t really know what to say, since our job is to be conservative and not make waves. If we had any balls, we’d point out that the NCI study is flawed to the core and tell you to ignore the hype. Instead, because we are afraid of being called on the carpet by the established medical hierarchy and losing our jobs for actually having a medically sound opinion and causing controversy by making an honest stand, we’ll say this. It’s probably OK to take fish oil but we’re not sure because there is some data suggesting higher risk so ask your own doctor.

Problem: There is no valid data at all to support this association and odds are “your own doctor” has not taken the time to learn what they really should about omega3’s. They are too busy fighting with insurance companies, hospital administrators and lawyers.

What we should say, if we understood Omega 3/6 biology, is the NCI study and the conclusions drawn by it are flawed to the core and constitute the worst kind of study imaginable. Following its advice is unhealthy and dangerous to you personally. There is no reasonably done study that shows anything but benefit to having Omega 3 levels in the range of 60+%.

And those that understood the study would point out its numerous flaws of which here are a few:

It’s prospective over 8 years and does not account for the fact that the men in question may have already had prostate cancer.

It floridly points out that the Omega6/3 ratio was massively in favor of Omega 6, meaning these people were nowhere near the preventative healthy levels of Omega 3 they needed to be.

It states high dose supplementation is dangerous but the average dosage was 500mg (hardly a high dose!) and did not even show up as meaningful in the levels that were obtained. In short, if these people were really supplementing, even with that low a dose, they should have been a bit higher. The actual difference between their levels and the levels of the prostate cancer free men could only be “made to be statistically significant” by the scale they were using to measure it. The actual amount of difference among all groups was around 0.2%. And again, all of the people in the study were Omega 6 dominant by far.

Populations (usually the things epidemiologists study!) with much, much higher Omega 3 levels and much, much lower Omega 6 levels, have a tiny incidence of prostate cancer and in fact most cancers that have ever been measured, occur at much smaller incidences in these populations. And there are dozens of studies to prove this. Which one gets all the airplay, the ONE TOTALLY FLAWED STUDY that shows something different.

So, I guess as a population, we are more interested in getting cancer than preventing it.

And now to the zombies in the news media. Rushing not to be left behind, each and every newspaper, columnist, blogger, TV reporter etc. etc. jumps on this worst information and propagates it like wild fire.

I am pretty sure Dr Brasky and colleagues knew this would happen.

Even worse is, even though the study has been completely debunked and point out to be false by numerous experts in the field, there are still numerous news media outlets that are STILL publishing this fallacy.

Only a few have come out and recanted their positions. All of them should, but they are already on to the next bad news disaster that is “trending”.

I hope for the sake of your health you are not “trending”. Frankly, it’s liable to get you killed!

Of all of the above, I am most disgusted at the ignorance and cowardice of my colleagues. As physicians we are supposed to give people our best advice. Sometimes, boys and girls, that means developing a new skill: learning to read studies. And sometimes, my dear friends in medicine, that means taking time to read what your patients are reading and advising them correctly as to its veracity. I know you did not ask for all the BS that has been heaped on your from the day you left medical school. I know you did not ask to spend your lives battling people who know nothing and don’t really care about you or your patients.

But, for God sakes don’t be one of them!

If you follow the leader and just try to make your life easy, you will end up not achieving what you swore to do: First, do no harm. Don’t be sheep and cowards. Peoples’ lives and futures depend on it.

Yours in health,

Dr Dave

PS while I am at it: there is zero human evidence to support the notion that higher doses of fish oil are “dangerously oxidized in the human body” in people with adequate Omega 3 levels. The major driving force for the oxidation that does happen in the body is free radical oxidation primarily propagated by Omega 6 fats. If you take enough Omega 3’s, (keep your blood levels at 60 to 70%) you will not have the oxidation issue. Studies using anti-oxidants like vitamin E along with fish oil, have shown no improvements in clinical end points. And there is zero human evidence to suggest fish oil actually increases bleeding to a dangerous level and there is zero human evidence to suggest it damages the immune system and makes you more vulnerable to infections. All of these are more biochem text nonsense that have not born out in human beings, where it actually matters.  A note to PhD’s: before you quote something out of a biochem text book, find out if it really matters to and in people, since it’s unlikely that cell cultures are going to read your article.

As I lay Dying – Omega 3 and Prostate Cancer

Surely I must be dying and this must be my last chance to write you in my physical form.

Any further communications you receive from my blogs, emails, personal notes-any further stage presentations or lectures must be coming from my ghost or perhaps an evil imposter trying to steal my identity.

I say this because after reading the most recent “study” directly linking the consumption of fish oil to the risk of prostate cancer, I must surely not be long for this world. And if that weren’t enough every blogger, commentator, and person with an opinion has dutifully parroted back the warnings expressed in the National Cancer Institute study of last week.

“Men do not take fish oil supplements”

Since I have been taking them in excess of 10 grams a day I must surely be riddled with prostate cancer and literally dying as we speak.

Only one problem: I don’t believe a word of it. In addition I think if you follow the advice of the study and the researchers that did it you are more likely to GET Cancer than avoid it. As a matter of fact you are a lot more likely to get Heart disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and a whole host of other diseases associated with a low Omega 3 and obligatorily high Omega 6 levels.

So in my opinion the advice of the National Cancer Institute Study may actually increase your risk of getting cancer or getting some other terrible disease that could be avoided with a higher level of Omega 3 and a lower level of Omega 6.

I hope you can see the irony in an organization that is supposedly designed to help you avoid cancer giving this kind of advice.

Now as to the “why would they do this” I’ll get to that but let’s look at a few things first .

I have said countless times that the biggest problem with many of the so called studies is they do not look at levels or attempt to get healthy levels of omega 3’s and lower levels of omega 6’s.

This particular study actually did report levels and the results would surprise no one who understands fatty acid biology in humans. The average level of Omega 3 to 6 was about 1/3. In other words these men with prostate cancer were typical of Western men in that they had high levels of inflammatory fats (Omega 6) and low levels of anti-inflammatory Omega 3.  For those of you who have taken my Ideal Omega test these men would be in the 25% or below with healthy being 60% or above. Simply put, if they were supplementing with fish oil they were not taking nearly enough!

At this point I should thank the NCI researchers for proving yet again a low Omega 3 and high Omega 6 is dangerous. The only problem is they went on to state the opposite. The statements were that Omega 6 and foods that contain it including nuts and seeds grains, and the oils that are derived from them are much better for you.

That is an extremely dangerous recommendation if it is interpreted as a free hand to consume large amounts of Omega 6 foods without balancing them with Omega 3 foods or supplements.

Why?

Because these foods will drive inflammation up in your body And the one thing that every cancer researcher in the country agrees on is inflammation is bad.

Did I mention the whole grain agenda? In case you haven’t noticed TV commercials abound extolling the virtues of whole grain. They neglect to mention it’s a wonderful source of inflammatory Omega 6’s.

Read this again please:  Every cancer researcher in the country agrees that inflammation is bad-except apparently some of those working for the National Cancer Institute.

Next another thing I have gone on about ad nauseum is proven by their work even though their conclusions were faulty. Under dosing with fish oil or not eating enough foods with Omega 3 and consuming too much Omega 6 is bad for you. The populations with the lowest Omega 6 and the highest Omega 3 have lowest incidence of most cancers including breast and prostate. They also have the lowest incidence of heart disease.

Speaking of heart disease have you noticed that since fish oil is linked to prostate cancer it has all of a sudden become good for your heart! Almost every headline or quote I have seen says while it’s good for your heart it’s bad for your prostate.

What ever happened to all those studies from early 2013 that stated fish oil was bad for your heart. Answer: they were effectively and scientifically refuted. In other words they were wrong and contained bad advice to avoid Omega 3’s for your heart.

Ok now let’s get to some of the “why’s”.

The lead researcher in this recent “fish oil no good for” published a prior study that showed no association between high levels of Omega 3. He was however trying. In this case he was triumphant staying, “we have once again shown that supplements can be dangerous for your health”. As I Pointed out he showed the opposite: under dosing is dangerous for your health but at least you can see the agenda: supplements are bad, unsafe need to be regulated (codex and FDA here we come) and only drugs are proven.

In spite of the recent and abysmal record of Big Pharma to provide safe treatments for sick people, there are many doctors out there who still count on organizations like the NCI for advice. And there are still plenty of doctors out there who are sympathetic to the “supplements are bad and just give you expensive urine” nonsense.

As the Pharmaceutical industry is pounded by legal and advertising issues and they’re profit margins sink in favor of people trying to take control of more of their health by supplementing, eating right, and exercising instead of taking drugs their control over your health and your pocket book is steadily shrinking and trust me, they don’t like it. Studies like this one designed to scare people into compliance with the status quo “Big daddy Pharma and his supporters know best!” are a welcome thing for them.

They will continue, just as the fish oil no good for your heart campaigns will continue.

Here is what you can expect:

In a little while this whole prostate thing will fade away under the continued positive results of Omega 3 at what are called high levels. As you may know what others call high I call normal and healthy.

In a little while there will be some other ” Fish oil no good for….” study that if you know how to analyze data and take the time to read it will simply show what this study showed: low levels of Omega 3 are dangerous and a big risk for Ill health and a lousy future.
The anti-supplement crusade will continue and unscrupulous and uneducated marketers will fuel this fire by making outrageous unsubstantiated claims with absolutely no scientific backing.

In a very short time there will be another scary inflammatory controversial Internet blast of something that is regarded as fact that will be simply opinion or more likely BS. The news media thrives on this and apparently so do human beings because we gobble up sound bites as fact like they were candy – feeding people’s need for emotional stimulation of ANY kind, especially fear. I guess it sells more products.
Speaking of products if you’ve taken this much time out of your sound bite schedule and read this far you probably know I make, take and sell fish oil. I have done so for well over a decade.

If you feel that I am yet another charlatan who is lying cheating and stealing from you by providing biased and wrong information, then you probably believe the conclusions of the NCI study that high Omega 6’s are good and high Omega 3’a are bad. And you’ll probably want to know that you are “safely” ensconced in a highly inflamed state.

There is a simple home test for this called Ideal Omega. If you want to be sure you are properly inflamed enough to meet their recommendations for your risk of prostate cancer you really should know your levels.
Conversely if you believe that the past 10+ years of my life of trying to educate the world about healthy levels of Omega 3 actually mean something, you’ll want to know if you are in the healthy range. I have recently completed a pretty large scale sampling of people out there in the real world and will be having a free tele-seminar for people who have completed the test to go over the results.

Sign up to my newsletter here to be notified of the teleseminar so you can participate.

Just remember chances are I will be speaking to you from the afterlife, having been consumed by the prostate cancer that surely must be raging through me this moment as we speak.

I think the authors do the NCI study have done a gigantic disservice to humanity and to people trying to reduce their risk of cancer. I am fairly convinced that it is deliberate grandstanding to get media attention. Sadly it has succeeded to a degree at least for the moment. It makes me truly worried for the future health of people.

Perhaps more worrisome is the uncontrolled emotional frenzy that seems to be par for the course whenever something ” new bad and different ” hits any form of social media.

If we need this to keep us interested in life we may as well be dead!

Stay healthy and learn to educate yourself, because the Internet is a bad place to learn in a lot of cases.

Doc

Doc’s Response to “Fish Oil and Prostate Cancer”

The response to the nonsense that was released as news was far greater than I anticipated. It seems that somehow this most recent “study” made it to the national news. What’s the matter news media? Is the George Zimmerman media circus and the Egypt thing already passé?

Any way since I am expected to have a response here it is.

Simply put its BS.

Here is a slightly longer response.

I am 100% convinced that these study results will never be proven in people in a real study, illuminated or found to be accurate. I am 100% convinced that at this point negative Omega 3 stuff is getting more press.  Watch for something completely opposite in 1 or 2 weeks. The problem is a positive study will not get any press since it’s not “news” I do not know that for a fact, it simply is the way things have been going. Think of this more as marketing-getting your “study read” and getting attention than actual scientific fact. Also remember this is not a real study, it’s a meta analysis which means any conclusion can be supported with the “desired” data base. I have not seen anything that makes me rethink any of my positions on this topic.  It’s kinda like telomerase activators and cancer LOL! How many times have I had to refute that with real information and it still comes up on occasions

Here is a study from just 2 months ago and it was a real study not a metanalysis. Also remember NO ONE is checking levels or attempting to duplicate the high tissue levels of the Intuits and Owkinawans who have almost no cancer of any kind… except me and Tom Gilhooley.

 PLoS One. 2013 Apr 17;8(4):e59799. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0059799. Print 2013.

Consumption of fish products across the lifespan and prostate cancer risk.

Torfadottir JE, Valdimarsdottir UA, Mucci LA, Kasperzyk JL, Fall K, Tryggvadottir L, Aspelund T, Olafsson O, Harris TB, Jonsson E, Tulinius H, Gudnason V,Adami HO, Stampfer M, Steingrimsdottir L.

I get very frustrated at all this sensationalism which to me is clearly done to call attention to whatever is published even if its misinformation.  The scientists who do this understand very clearly the impressions they make on people. Their response is “Well we are just reporting our data”. The problem is no one actually reads the info. The average person is sound bite oriented and will believe anything they read good or bad without question and without research. Just look at Brian Peskin LOL! People still send me his nonsense. And I still send them the links delineating his activities at the * below.

Anyway  if you can read Bill Lands book Fish,Omega 3 and Human Health.  I have spent hours on the phone with him researching my upcoming books. He’s now in his 80’s and is really the godfather of the whole Omega 3/6 thing. The book is the only $80 paperback I have ever seen but it will tell you everything we do and don’t know as of a few years ago.  Ironically a lot of scientists are still in the dark about the research classic example “Fish oil may make high blood pressure worse” a headline from a few months ago. . This was actually another DHA only study so the use of the term “fish oil” is already misleading. But it was a mouse study and drew human conclusions.  Someone forgot to tell the brilliant UCLA scientists that did it that mice are herbivores and have a totally different eicosanoid system and a totally different response since they DON”T FRIGGIN EAT FISH.

And speaking of not eating fish. If this study connecting DHA to cancer had any basis in reality then the populations with the highest levels of Omega 3’s would also have the highest incidence of cancer and the populations with the lowest Omega 3’s would have the lowest rate of cancer. In reality it is the exact opposite. It never stops LOL!  Hope all is well with you!

Dr Dave

*In January 2003, the District Court of Harris County, Texas issued a permanent injunction ordering Peskin and his company to pay $100,000 to the State of Texas and to refrain from making certain claims [1]. Among other things, the injunction ordered that Peskin must refrain from:(i) “Advertising or labeling any food product or drug which makes any express or implied claims that such product will …(4) reduce the risk of breast, prostate and other cancers…”

(ii) “Representing, expressly or by implication, in any advertising of any product, that Defendant Brian Scott Peskin is a ‘scientist,’ ‘Professor,’ or ‘Doctor,’ or that Brian Scott Peskin is the ‘holder of the Emeritus Life-Systems Engineering Chair, College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences at Texas Southern University’ “

So its up to you if you want to believe what he says about fish oil.  I think he should get together with the authors of this study- they may have something in common!

Fish Oil and Prostate Cancer (Part 2)

 Continuation of:

Fish Oil and Prostate Cancer Part 1

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In actuality the hormonal changes in men are not nearly as universal as they are in women. Some men can maintain healthy testosterone levels into their 80’s and presumably beyond.

Some men but not most men!

Most men begin to have some decline in their Testosterone levels when they hit their late 30’s for one of 2 reasons. First their brain may simply stop producing a hormone called LH that stimulates the testis to make testosterone.  This is often called Secondary testicular failure because if you give them back the LH, their testis works just fine. Primary Testicular failure occurs when the testis themselves fail to make testosterone no matter how much LH is present.

The youngest case of low testosterone I have seen because of either of these causes is age 27. I also have 70+ year olds whose Testosterone is in the upper 80%. By that time and usually far before that however the average male begins to drift down in his testosterone levels. He may not actually get higher DHT or Estrogen levels, but they become RELATIVELY high due to the declining level of Testosterone and the steady or increased levels of DHT and Estrogen.

The worse this situation, the more likely it seems to be a set up for Prostate Cancer. Again prostate cancer is a disease of aging in most cases.  It has been said that if all men lived long enough, all men would get Prostate Cancer.

Thus, as an Anti-Aging Doctor prevention becomes one of my primary objectives.

Fish Oil Blocks the conversion of Testosterone to DHT which is why it has become so popular among athletes who want to maximize their testosterone levels legally. You already know it improves Growth Hormone response too. Fish Oil also blocks the formation of Tumor Angiogenesis Factor (TAF from the breast cancer emails) and thus may prevent prostate tumors from growing enough new blood vessels to keep growing. Fish Oil inhibits the genetic step that promotes tumor metastasis (spread of the tumor).

In interventional studies with men who had Prostate cancer already (remember we don’t give people cancer just to see if the drug or vitamin works!) showed marked outcome improvements when Fish Oil was used as an adjunct to therapy.

So what is the traditional Party line from “Modern Medicine”?

Same B. S.  as usual.  No enough data. Data from fish consumption only,( some magic and as yet unknown part of the fish might possibly have an infinitesimally small chance of being the real active ingredient other that EPA and DHA), can’t use this during therapy or it will interfere with the REAL treatment. While traditionalists cling to this nonsense, people continue to die unnecessarily of this cancer. As with Breast Cancer, high intakes of Omega 6 fatty acids and low levels of Omega 3 Fish Oil is a risk factor for Prostate cancer.

I am sure all of you men out there know someone who has prostate cancer.  Please share this information with them.  But warn them the FDA would rather not admit any of this because there is no big DRUG COMPANY that stands to benefit! Also remember even if you don’t have prostate cancer yet, An Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of Cure!

Best, Doc

P.S. Remember, do not stop or decrease any drugs you may be taking without the expressed permission of your doctor!

References and conclusions:

Dietary intake of n-3 and n-6 fatty acids and the risk of prostate cancer.
Leitzmann MF, Stampfer MJ, Michaud DS, Augustsson K, Colditz GC, Willett WC, Giovannucci EL.

CONCLUSIONS: Increased dietary intakes of ALA may increase the risk of advanced prostate cancer. In contrast, EPA and DHA intakes may reduce the risk of total and advanced prostate cancer.

Am J Clin Nutr. 2004 Jun;79(6):935-45.

Dietary long-chain n-3 fatty acids for the prevention of cancer: a review of potential mechanisms.

Larsson SC, Kumlin M, Ingelman-Sundberg M, Wolk A.

Increasing evidence from animal and in vitro studies indicates that n-3 fatty acids, especially the long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids eicosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid, present in fatty fish and fish oils inhibit carcinogenesis.

Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2003 Sep;12(9):926-7.

Inuit are protected against prostate cancer.

Dewailly E, Mulvad G, Sloth Pedersen H, Hansen JC, Behrendt N, Hart Hansen JP.

Our results suggest that in situ carcinoma is rare among Inuit and that their traditional diet, which is rich in omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids…

PMID: 14504206 [PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE]

J Steroid Biochem Mol Biol. 2002 Nov;82(4-5):393-400.

5 alpha-reductase-catalyzed conversion of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone is increased in prostatic adenocarcinoma cells: suppression by 15-lipoxygenase metabolites of gamma-linolenic and eicosapentaenoic acids.  SIC  EPA = fish Oil! This particular study showed and 80% reduction in 5 alpha reductase activity!

Fish Oil and Prostate Cancer (Part 1)

It is often suggested that Prostate cancer is the male equivalent of Breast cancer. There are some striking similarities. Both are hormonally driven and both occur with increasing frequency as a person ages. As you will also see, the mechanisms by which Fish Oil prevents and improves the outcomes in this type of cancer are also very similar to how it works in Breast cancer.

One of the things that distinguishes men from women is the presence of an enzyme in the skin and other areas of the body called 5 alpha reductase. This is the enzyme that converts Testosterone into its more potent but less desirable androgenic cousin Dihydroxytestosterone or DHT for our purposes. Women do not have this enzyme at least in any meaningful amounts. As a man ages the enzymatic activity of 5 alpha reductase seems to increase and converts more Testosterone into DHT. Additionally this happens while men are making less Testosterone in general (aging!).

Another enzyme that seems to become more active as a man ages is the enzyme Aromatize which changes DHT into estrogen. This coupled with declining levels of Testosterone leads to a situation where some men in their 50’s actually have as much or more estrogen floating around as Testosterone. Couple this with declining levels of Growth Hormone and you can see why the stereotypical middle aged male has a gut, increased body fat and decreased muscle tone.

This situation makes men mentally flabby as well!

Now comes the interesting part with regards to Prostate Cancer. For years it was taught (and a surprising number of doctors still think) that high levels of Testosterone lead to Prostate cancer and male Breast cancer. This was one of the warnings used to dissuade would be bodybuilders from using anabolic steroids.

Then it was found that the men who entered their 60’s and 70’s with the highest natural testosterone levels had the least amount of prostate cancer. In a sense the implication was that Testosterone therapy might actually PREVENT Prostate cancer. At this moment the Urologists in the crowd are having steam come out of their ears.  This is not what they want to hear!

In truth it is much more complex than that, but I had to have a little fun and ruffle a few feathers.

Here’s how we think it actually works:

Much like estrogen in women, the relative or in some cases absolute excess of estrogen in men seems to promote the Prostate Cancer.  This explains why men with high testosterone (naturally high) seem not to get prostate cancer and men with low testosterone do. Generally the ones with high testosterone have maintained a higher ratio of testosterone to estrogen than men whose testosterone has fallen and the other enzymatic pathways have become dominant. Some health gurus have twisted these facts to blame other sources such as diets, soy xenoextrogens (estrogens from outside sources like animals and plants added to our food stuffs) and of course medicines.

There is some truth to this especially with pickled foods. But let’s set the record straight on soy. If you go back to “The Truth About Soy” email of last week you will see that at least in the case of soy, it blocks estrogens effects.

Doc

P.S. This is continued in Part 2. Click here.

References:

Regulation of gene expression and inhibition of experimental prostate cancer bone metastasis by dietary genistein.

 

For example, the expression of various metalloproteinases (MMPs) in PC3 bone tumors was inhibited by genistein treatment, whereas osteoprotegerin was upregulated. MMP immunostaining and transfection experiments also demonstrated that MMP-9 expression was inhibited in PC3 cells in vitro and PC3 bone tumors in vivo after genistein treatment. These results, particularly the in vivo results, demonstrate that dietary genistein may inhibit prostate cancer bone metastasis by regulating metastasis-related genes. Genistein may thus be a promising agent for the prevention and/or treatment of prostate cancer.

So what about the gurus that say that soy causes you to become feminized?  Well, they should know better.  I think they actually do but are sacrificing truth and accuracy for copy that stirs up their readers.  This to me is a bigger crime than ignorance!  Here is another reference:
Soy isoflavones in the treatment of prostate cancer.

Hussain M, Banerjee M, Sarkar FH, Djuric Z, Pollak MN, Doerge D, Fontana J, Chinni S, Davis J, Forman J, Wood DP, Kucuk O.

TA-65, Telomeres and Cancer, Yet Again

I am not sure how many times I’ve said that longer telomeres protect against cancer. Probably almost as many times as I’ve had to refute someone saying “telomerase causes cancer therefore TA-65 might cause cancer.”

Back in December 2010 JAMA a very drug centric Big Pharma supported journal published a study that associated short telomere lengths with more cancer and worse cancer and vice versa. Conclusion: short telomeres are associated with cancer and long ones are not.  Then came the attacks

“What about those tumors that have longer telomeres like glioblastoma?”

Answer: those tumors use the ALT mechanism to lengthen their telomeres which does not involve telomerase. This mechanism, ALT, is however associated with the same genetic (or if you prefer genomic) instability that is caused by short telomeres because the recombination of ALT ruins the integrity of the genome, similar to the way short telomeres allow the genome to become unstable.

The common pathway is genome instability.

So over the past 5 years or so I’ve been fighting a slowly winning battle to convince more and more people that having longer telomeres or more specifically fewer critically short ones is a good thing associated with better health and potentially longer life.

Along with this I have been saying that because the immune stimulation, something TA-65 does really well, having healthier telomeres may turn out to be cancer protective.

I have also been asked, “If you got cancer would you keep taking TA-65?” My answer is: I would take more!!! Or more specifically I would take high dose (4 a day) more frequently that once a day.”

Now here is the disclaimer part:

I am telling you what I would do, not what you should do. If you are worried about cancer or have cancer, the usual advice must apply- talk to YOUR doctor! Do not interpret what I have said here to mean that TA-65 is in any way cancer protective or a cancer treatment, and know clearly that what I have said here is contrary to the advice 99.99% physicians in advanced countries with advanced Pharmaceutical Industries would tell you.

But while you are at it read this:

http://www.sciencecodex.com/telomere_length_influences_cancer_cell_differentiation-114851

It basically says that cancer cells try to keep their telomeres short because it facilitates their “cancer like” behavior. It also says that lengthening telomeres would increase the differentiation of the cell into a less cancer like form that may not have the immortal and aggressive characteristics of a cancer.

And finally think about what I’ve been telling you for the past 5 years and watch for more and more supporting evidence.

Stay well and have fun!

Doc

Sirtuins, resveratrol and human longevity

There are some serious issues with the way resveratrol is being marketed.

1) A few years ago it was touted as a telomerase inhibitor and NOT to be taken with TA-65. Now there are claims that it is a telomerase activator and at least 1 study in vitro that suggests that this might be the case. However, the lab is a very distant realm from living human beings as I have often pointed out in support of TA-65. I personally sent four different brands of resveratrol to Bill Andrews at Sierra Sciences for testing before he affiliated with Isagenix and none of them tested positive for telomerase. Bill I think has tested other samples and found the same result. Thus, where the rubber meets the road, resveratrol has failed to activate telomerase. There are many reasons why this could be but one in particular is operator inexperience. This is why I went to Bill Andrews. No one on the planet has more experience with testing for telomerase activation.

2) In addition you may be aware of the 750 million dollar acquisition of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals by GSK. The “super resveratrol” Dr Sinclair produced for them was removed from phase 2 trials due to hepatotoxicity. Another thing that reportedly happened was an inability to reproduce prior results for resveratrol.

The scientific community believes that resveratrol has been seriously over-hyped by its marketers and I concur. It has pretty clearly been shown to work through adipokines and at best indirectly activates Sir 1, which has been proven to be a metabolic sensing gene and not a longevity gene, and that is at best.  Sir 6 shows some promise in humans but most of us in the field who are actually learned on the topic feel all the sittings are metabolic sensors and may exert some healthspan but not lifespan improvements, e.g. They are not true longevity genes in higher mammals and resveratrol is NOT a direct activator of any of them.

In my view, resveratrol is a good antioxidant that has merit, especially in the obese, diabetic and elderly. It is a mild mitochondrial poison, which decreases metabolism in the fashion calorie restriction does and doses should NOT exceed 300mg a day for this reason. At this point all my attempts to directly verify it has any direct actions as a telomerase activator or a Sirtuin stimulant has pointed in an opposite direction. The marketing machine, however, continues to present and represent it that way.

I would also add that I seriously doubt that resveratrol is the only natural compound that acts to improve metabolic sensing – it simply has had more money thrown at it because of its purported affiliation with Calorie Restriction (CR). CR has also been studied for 25 years now and in my opinion it has shown disappointing results in the longevity department unless you are a fruit fly, a round worm, or a very specific breed of mouse. The most common breed of mouse used in longevity experiments, known as “Black 6”, has not seen any life extension from CR.

The good news is the CR society is putting their money where their mouth is (no pun intended!) and at least planning on participating in studies that will verify or vilify what they are doing for markers of longevity. I hope they follow through with it because it may help answer the questions about CR and longevity where it really counts: you and me!

In the meantime, I would remind you that there is very strong evidence that increased telomerase expression is much more likely to extend life and repair many of the defects associated with aging than any other therapy, especially in mammals. I would also remind you that TA-65 was, is and has been the only telomerase activator that has been proven to work in mammalian studies. And that includes humans like you and me!

Doc

I wouldn’t give my dog Ethyl Ester Fish Oil – Part 2

In this part of the blog I go into even more detail debunking the arguments that seem to have gathered steam on the internet.  It is irritating because it represents “negative sales tactics” which try to capitalize on “bad news” that will shock you because it “challenges everything you know about –insert your favorite topic–“.

This is a well known sales tactic and in today’s Internet-based, opinion-rich, information-poor, sound bite climate, people know most of us won’t read past the headlines (micro scripts) much less try to find out the facts behind what is being said. And if you add a little bit of ‘sciency’ sounding stuff, you’ve convinced 99.9% of the population.

Warning: I don’t do a little sciency when I debunk. I do A LOT SCIENCY and the following is that; so you’ve been warned!

Here is an interesting email from a victim of today’s technology and a well-meaning but misinformed anti-ethyl ester fish oil campaign.

“Dr Dave, please visit ‘www.–A Consumer Advocate Site–.org’.

They say Omega 3’s are best when delivered in their natural state – be it in fish oil capsules or from eating fish – not the form that you sell, advocate and defend…

The environmental impact of the Norwegian industrial fishing industry is devastating…

Ethyl esters are not effective in the reducing the risk of heart attack or stroke…the many large, protracted studies are now showing this…

We should be as outraged about ethyl esters in our food supply as we are of GMO’s…”.

Hi, Phillip. Lately I am seeing more and more of this. I even recently spoke a t a conference where the guy before me said exactly the same thing since he was selling “natural triglyceride” formulation fish oil. The problem is that it is 100% wrong.

1) The largest fish oil trial ever done was GISSI Prevenzione and they used ethyl ester fish oil with fabulous results.

2) Ethyl ester are a naturally occurring intermediate between triglycerides and Phospholipid formats of Omega 3 and have biologic value of their own, separate from the other two formats.

3) EE’s have a unique 24-hour absorption curve instead of the spike-like absorption of the other formats of Omega 3, making them the BEST choice for someone wishing to get maximum cardiac coverage. EE’s are in the blood stream for a full 24 hours.  Most heart attacks happen in the early morning, 18 to 22 hours after most people take their daily dose of fish oil, which (at least theoretically) puts them at risk with “natural TG products”. Phospholipid formats have not been evaluated in any large clinical trials similar to GISSI.

4) ALL TG products and P’lipid products can and do pass back and forth through ethyl ester formats as the body needs them to; so saying otherwise merely shows the ignorance or duplicity of the people making that statement.

5) Ethyl esters are free of the toxins and much more potent in terms of EPA and DHA than “natural” TG products, which cannot exceed 30% EPA and DHA and are subject to the exact toxic mixture of the oceans or streams they are harvested from. In addition, whenever the krill people try to show superiority over fish oil, which they have yet to actually do, they choose the wimpiest format they can – natural triglyceride – so they have the best chance of looking better. They would not dare compare clinical outcomes to my Ultra 85 for this reason. No matter what the “parent oil” people say, the only Omega’s that matter are DHA and EPA. This is a simple fact of human biochemistry since this is what the body does when it needs Omega 3. All other forms are either intermediates to get there or are simply used for calories. The latter does not happen very often because people are mostly Omega 3 deficient.

6) Other than the fact that the Norwegians are not the suppliers of all of the fish oil that is used, I am not sure what real impact it has – economic, yes — environmental? If less Norwegian fish are being used, which may be true, as most of the fish now used are from other waters, as in the case of my Ultra 85 are fresh water sourced from non-endangered species. The molecular distillation process is low heat (135 F – the oxidation point of fish oil is 253 F) and has essentially a zero carbon footprint – at least the way we do it.

7) There was one study done recently showing the “failure” of Ethyl Esters as a potential agent to treat hypertension. This study got a ton of “airplay” on the Internet and was immediately picked up as a marketing tool for the ‘just eat fish and natural triglyceride’ sales force. However that study had gigantic flaws…

a) It used a mouse model with a SNP to create hypertension. In humans HTN is polygenic.

b) Even though it was reported as “Fish oil no good for…..”  it did not include the better part of fish oil, which is EPA, in the evaluation.

c) It completely (and I think embarrassingly for the people that published it) overlooked one gigantic fact: Mice are herbivores and people are omnivores. The way the different species use Omega 3’s and 6’s, the tissue % of EE TG and P’lipids, the eicosanoid and other active derivatives are ALL different in mice and humans, so generalizing a dietary intervention as being relevant is bound to be wrong. I think the brilliant scientists that did the study knew this, or at least should have! There is plenty of data to support the use of fish oil as an adjunct for healthy blood pressure.

As far as “many recent studies that show failures of ethyl ester fish oil”- many of them are triglyceride based as well, not just ethyl ester. I address the causes for this in #8.

8) Finally, as to the failure of fish oil in human studies. It can almost always be attributed to the following: Inadequate dosage, no attempt to check tissue or blood levels of O3’s and 6’s, and no attempt to achieve the levels seen in what are basically “disease free” populations. This is independent of the format of Omega 3 (O3) used but “natural” triglyceride format is most susceptible to this effect because of its lower concentrations of EPA and DHA. You have to take 3x as many of this type of “parent oil capsule” to get an adequate dose of Omega 3 to impact human health. Now, keep in mind that there is a dose response curve to Omega 3’s so even a little will show some improvements in health but nowhere near what is actually achievable.

Many of the so-called failed studies are also done with only 1 gram of some type of fish oil that is often non-specified because the researchers don’t know the difference. The usual situation is also to add them onto “maximum medical therapy (drugs)” that the enrollee has been on for years to treat a well-established condition. For more on this see my blog “Fish oil Failure by Design“.

Again, I need to stress – there are no other meaningful O3’s in fish other than EPA and DHA in the context of Western Society. The other fats are just calories.

It is sad that people can say anything they want on the internet and worse that it spreads like wildfire. Next week it will be some other nonsense by people like this. We owe almost all of our knowledge about Omega 3’s and 6’s to a relatively few PhD’s whom I respect immensely. Sadly, we also owe almost all of the misinformation to the same group of people who stare at biochemistry texts and look at where the arrows go without noticing whether those arrows go backwards, sideways or are dotted, meaning they are negligible. The original group of scientists that did all this work were very concerned and delineated as best they could what was meaningful in human biochemistry.  Many of today’s researchers seem to have lost that work or have decided to ignore it. My deepest respect for those who actually take the time to learn what those before them laid out so clearly. As for the rest, you need to get your head out of the basic biochemistry texts that show every possible way a fat can be processed and learn what actually happens in people! And, if you are going to study mice, learn the differences before you decide where it’s safe to generalize to human health.

The major impact on the fishing industry occurs not from fish oil processing but from restaurant serving of specific types of fish, which are clearly overfished. Krill, while not a fish, must be placed in this category for different reasons. While human fishing has gone on for millennium, krill fishing has not and represents a severe threat to a previously untouched biosphere that has caused negative sustainability impact in a matter of a decade. At this point, the capacity of aquaculture for the major formats of fish oil is stable and has more capacity to produce. As I mention above, my Ultra 85 is sourced from fresh water non-endangered species and processed using a nil carbon foot print technology, so it has minimal environmental impact. I do have to say that I anticipate others copying this, which may force us to rethink our sourcing yet again down the road when everyone else jumps on board.

As a final note I would say this: No matter what or how you choose to replete your Omega 3’s, you should use the Ideal Omega test to establish your baseline and follow your results. If you are eating a lot of fish, you really need to get your mercury levels tested in blood, hair and nails as well. Reducing your Omega 6 intake will concomitantly reduce the need for Omega 3’s but this is beyond what most people are willing to do in our society. Ultra 85 is a pure, clean and simple way to improve your Omega 3 levels and achieve this very desirable healthy balance of essential fatty acids.

Best,

Dr Dave

I wouldn’t give my dog Ethyl Ester Fish oil – Part 1

So said the brilliant PhD whose talk preceeded mine at a recent public anti-aging conference.

While I am not 100% sure if this was a deliberate snipe at me I didn’t care because it played right into my hands. I destroyed the arguments that were advanced in favor of “natural triglyceride fish oil” also known as “parent oil” type.  I am sure it hit this guy where it hurt and ultimately he shot himself in the foot and damaged himself, not me.  This was also the same guy who told me he knew more about telomeres than the guy who discovered the human telomerase gene and the Nobel laureates, so I wasn’t too worried about anything else he might have said.

What I did not know was this might not have been his fault. He may have merely been parroting back the current doctrine d’jour with regards to fish oil. It makes for clever marketing speak and for someone who does not intimately know about Omega3/Omega 6 biochemistry in HUMANS it is a perfect chance to pitch a product that is inferior in every way or some other attached agenda.

Here is the short version and then, for those of you who want to learn the reasoning, it follows after another email I got.

ERROR NUMBER 1: Fish is better than fish oil because it contains natural proportions of oils. Natural Triglyceride fish oil is closer to natural fish oil making it a “parent oil”. Populations that eat fish do better than populations that take fish oil for this reason.

The fact: EPA and DHA are the ultimate and most highly active and needed fish oils. There is little or nothing other than these in fish or fish oil that is responsible for health benefits in humans. The body will create these essential fatty acids to a minor extent from shorter chain precursors (like alpha linolenic acid in plants) but it cannot do a good job of this, especially in the omega 6 rich food environment we live in. The Omega 3/6 intake of the best populations is never mirrored in ANY study using fish oil (see part 2 of this blog for why). Much of the oil in fish and natural triglyceride fish oil is used for one major purpose: calories, and fatty fish have a major component of Omega 6 fat as well, although nowhere near their Omega 3 content. In the context of trying to achieve balance in a society that does not reduce its Omega 6 intake, which is most of us, a pure highly concentrated EPA/DHA fish oil remains the simplest way to obtain a healthy ratio. The most common way to create that ultra concentrated potency is molecular distillation, which always yields an Ethyl Ester fish oil. The next two books I am currently writing will, however, have two dozen or more Omega 3 heavy recipes for those who want to use diet as the major tool.

ERROR NUMBER 2: ‘A little mercury and other toxins are OK for you.’  Fish and natural triglyceride fish oils contain the exact toxin make up of the waters they are obtained from. There is absolutely no study showing the effect of low level long term toxin exposure over decades or a lifetime to determine what real level of toxicity we should be concerned with since we are going to need our Omega 3’s as long as we are alive. We do know this:  unless you drastically reduce your Omega 6 intake to a level far lower than most Westerners will tolerate, you need a large amount of Omega 3 (in terms of fish, we are talking far more than Eskimo level) to balance the ratio of 6 to 3 omegas. In point of fact, populations where there are serious reductions in the diseases we accept as “normal aging” achieve a ratio of about 0.75, which means there is significantly more Omega 3 in their tissues than Omega 6. This puts you at risk for many different toxins and xenoestrogens, especially mercury, lead, cadmium and various plastic derivatives. Two specific famous examples of people who tried to correct their levels with large amounts of fish ingestion are Jeremy Piven and Daphne Zuniga, both actors and both mercury toxic as a result of their efforts. There are studies that show an Alaskan subsistence fishermen consuming one cod per week will achieve mercury levels considered accutely toxic by the end of that week, DO YOU want that? I don’t!

ERROR NUMBER 3: Ethyl Esters are not naturally occuring in nature, making them “Frankenfishoil equivalent to GMO’s!”  I gotta hand it to the marketers who came up with that one! Wow, that will convince a lot of people because most people are anti-GMO. Very clever, but also very disingenuous.

Ethyl Esters are not found in fish or seafood; that is true. But they ARE A NATURALLY OCCURING AND BIOACTIVE INTERMEDIATE IN HUMAN BEINGS.  We create them from triglycerides and Phospholipid (non-fish seafood sources) as a normal everyday part of our biology. That makes them about as natural as you can get.

I go on to address more of this nonsense in the next blog but if you understand these 3 points you will understand what you are being fed by the internet gurus. Don’t swallow it!

Dr Dave

Telomeres and longevity – questions from readers

The following questions were sent in concerning telomeres, telomerase, TA-65 and the Life Length assay as offered in the U. S. by adltests.com.

Question 1:  Is the database mainly constructed in the US?

Answer:  The database is worldwide but the bulk of the database comes from the U.S. The only lab currently offering the Life Length assay in the U.S. is adltests.com.

Question 2:   Why is it that the average percent of short telomeres is roughly the same, and not rising, for the deciles 31-40, 41-50 and 51-60 of the results report?

Answer: The percentage of short telomeres required to drive disease/dysfunction is the same no matter what the age range of the participant. There is a threshold within each cell thus generating “old cells” that need to be removed in any biologic age population. Similarly “young cells” can exist in any age population as well. The threshold that confers senescence or apoptosis (self destruction/removal) of the cell is not dependent on chronologic age solely. It is dependent on number of replications, accrued damage (oxidation) and measures one might take to minimize or reverse that damage. The so-called Hayflick limit is an idealized maximum number of cellular divisions that can occur in more or less perfect conditions and implies that, no matter what, the cells will continue to “age” due to telomere loss.  The actual human Hayflick limit is now 122 years as witnessed by Jean Calumet, the oldest documented human being who died fairly recently. It is important to understand that the Life Length assay is the only one reporting percent of short telomeres at this point, and one can have “normal” mean telomere length with a low or high percentage of short telomeres. The latter changes the meaning of telomere testing completely, as most people with “normal” mean telomere length have no idea if their cells are old or young biologically because this critical piece of information is missing.

Question 3:   Have you found any evidence that the average percent of short telomeres may vary across different ethnic groups or by gender or any other grouping factor?

Answer:  Since the Life Length Assay is still new I don’t think I can honestly answer that question until the database grows to a much larger size. Basing the answer on previous technologies may lead to false conclusions since they do not yield this kind of data. But the short answer and the one that is currently (and I stress the word “currently”) accepted is that there may be such ethnic and more likely gender differences. For instance there is a small subset of Ashkenazi Jews that have allelic “over expression” of telomerase which confers longer telomeres and longer life/healthspans.

But for most of us epigenetics which while heritable is also mutable is the most likely factor in telomere length and lifespan. Things like nutrition/supplementation stress handling, sleep, exercise habits etc are still far more likely to contribute to telomere health and length for the general population.

Question 4: Has there been any empirical test of the telomere hypothesis, i.e. that individuals with low percentages live longer?

Answer: There have been many such studies and it is generally agreed upon in the “telomere community” that, based on the studies, this is an immutable fact. Similarly evidence exists to show improved health parameters as well in humans mouse and human cell lines although this is a different line of questioning.

You will find large scale studies to validate that longer telomeres equate to longer life starting here.

You will need to scroll to several pages to get the ones that specifically answer that question. In addition due to the failure of Calorie restriction over expression of telomerase to lengthen telomeres now exists as the ONLY method of extending life span in higher mammals. Maria Blasco was able to demonstrate a single isolated treatment with telomerase added 25% to the life span of middle aged mice and 13% to old mice. Her study on short telomere rate increase can be found here.

Please note: until the pharmaceutical industry jumps on this bandwagon, no one will have the money to do the study we all want: a longitudinal study of humans with random selection (not twins, etc.) in diverse populations over many decades to see the effects on human longevity when we turn on telomerase with supplements or other avenues. In other words “Can we make people live longer and healthier by lengthening their telomeres or more specifically decreasing the number (%) of short telomeres?” Even then it is likely they will not do that study; rather the answer will come from several generations of clinical observation and research into the results of drug therapy for telomerase when that actually happens. Surprisingly, human longevity and healthspan are not even on the radar of most governments!

TA-65 is currently the only telomerase activator that has been 1) evaluated for safe human consumptions 2) Proven to work in human beings. No other compound has that data.

One thing we know at this point is that, statistically speaking, diseases are fewer and lives are longer in those blessed with healthy long telomeres.

Please keep in mind one can still be hit by a bus!!!

Dr Dave

Telomeres, Chronic Pain and Accelerated Aging

A new study has linked the pain syndrome known as Fibromyalgia to shortened telomeres (biologic time clocks). I have already begun to get emails asking me if TA-65 will help this, due to the most recent information.

Before I answer that question, a little background is in order. As you hopefully know already, the telomere is a small segment of non-coding DNA at the end of the chromosome.  Originally thought to be junk, it was found to be intimately involved in “cell cycle” regulation.  Things like the ability of the cell to replicate and make more of itself, as well as many functions associated with cellular (and organismal) aging, were eventually tied to telomere length.

Things like overall longevity, healthspan, and the associations of all kinds of diseases of aging, including heart disease, Alzheimer’s, cancer, depression and stress, were seen with shortened telomeres*. In some cases, they are clearly biomarkers of aging and disease. In some cases, they drive aging and disease.

In all cases that we know of so far, longer, healthier telomeres are associated with improved prognosis in the middle and older age groups that get these diseases. And of course, they are part of living longer.  In populations that have “allelic variations”, which are basically mutations, in most cases that express increased amounts of telomerase (the enzyme that lengthens telomeres), there is a significant likelihood you will find the extremely long-lived and more healthy individuals.

Fibromyalgia (FM) is a vexing, chronic pain syndrome that seems to have many causes and just as many treatments. In addition to antidepressants and numerous dietary and exercise prescriptions, there is a growing feeling among many people who have treated it, that it is a mitochondrial disorder.

The mitochondria, the cellular powerhouses, appear to become dysfunctional in this syndrome and facilitate pain transmission via the effects of the toxic metabolites they produce and can no longer handle. Basically, a free radical trigger like oxygen or nitrogen accumulates and is not appropriately balanced or handled, and a series of events result that cause pain transmission to occur at a lower threshold.  The attendant illness, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), is even easier to explain by this mechanism, since decreased mitochondrial function is associated with lowered energy output and fatigue.  This is what you see as your parents age and slow down as well!

If you live in Europe or Japan and have CFS or FM and seek treatment, you will most likely receive Coenzyme Q10 in its reduced form, in doses of around 400mg a day as starters.  This is also the dose I give my elderly patients complaining of fatigue (200mg 2X a day or 400mg at once). Here in the US, most doctors avoid using supplements for treatment, still clinging to anti-depressants and lifestyle modifications, which if they work at all, are the result of the person slowly healing themselves by avoiding excess energy expenditure and healing their mitochondria!

So, the question comes around to treatment.  I always started with Coenzyme Q10 and then moved into B Vitamins.  When TA-65 came along much later (2009), its energizing properties were of great use to some of my patients with CFS.  I never did an official study though, and it was not part of our soon-to-be-released TA-65 survey questions.

Still, the telomere seems to have some major sway over mitochondrial behavior.  Dr Ron DePinho, now at MD Anderson Cancer Center, has shown the likely involvement of telomere length directly affecting mitochondrial energy generation, biogenesis, and mutation rate.  So, it’s highly likely that anything that improves the health and length of the telomeres like TA-65 should be of great help in CFS.

The other thing to keep in mind is the modification of the way the body deals with stress.  Our Nobel Laureate, Liz Blackburn and her colleague Elisa Epel, have done several studies that show telomere length correlates with perceived stress levels.  Others have shown the association with depression.

The key word here is “perception”. We all know people who have had what most of us would term a hard life, physically and mentally, but live long and happy lives. We all know people who fall apart at the slightest provocation and respond poorly to minimal stresses. Often referred to as a person’s “nature” (happy, sad, stoic, etc), these correlations with biologic changes have made doctors uncomfortable since they are not easily quantifiable. Liz Blackburn used urinary excretions of stress metabolites to give this kind of perception a quantifiable and valid number. They also found cortisol drops over time, instead of rising, giving credence to the concept of “adrenal burnout”. Lowered cortisol or inappropriate cycles of cortisol secretion can allow the chronic, low grade, self-targeting inflammation we know is associated with many diseases of “aging” to rise and run rampant.

If you’ve gotten this far in this blog with me, then you will probably not be surprised by the following comment: Candice Pert, Bruce Lipton and Abraham Hicks are right! How you handle things and what you think about has a lot to do with what goes on inside your body!!!

I am now in my 4^th year of taking TA-65. There have been a few times when I stopped it for a week or two. No More! I cannot afford anything less than maximum drive and energy in my life!

Doc

*One final comment on the article:

Since the article mentions “biologic age”, I would hope the method used to determine telomere length included both median and percentage short telomeres, since the latter is really the only assay that can comment on biologic age. Short telomeres drive aging and cellular dysfunction and currently the “cut off” is in the 3KB range. Short telomeres are unseen in typical QPCR and FLO FISH assays, which also have poor accuracy and reproducibility. They can easily be at a critical value, buried within the data of median telomere length and often do not correlate well with median or mean telomere length at all. The veracity of small studies especially, could be markedly improved by using HT-QFISH technology developed by Maria Blasco that has been commercially available for over three years now. In its absence, the findings of any telomere study that is looking at individuals in small numbers, is questionable. The median telomere length is also obtained by this technique and it correlates well with other technologies.

If you are serious about telomere length measurements for your own personal use, then go to ADLTests.com and get the life length assay done. If you are already on TA-65, any future telomere tests you do should be done with this test.

Reference quote from the article which appeared in Anesthesiology News on-line: “Patients were categorized as experiencing high levels of pain (BPI ≥5; n=30) or lower levels of pain (BPI<5; n=31). Women who scored at least a 5 on the BPI—the cutoff for “high” levels of pain—were more likely to have shorter telomeres regardless of their chronological age (F=5.39;P=0.024). “This difference,” Dr. Hassett said, “represents approximately five years of aging.” That estimate is based on a previous study that linked the deterioration of telomeres to time (Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 1998;95:5607-5610).”

Fish oil – Failure by design

A few months ago I wrote a blog/newsletter entitled “Don’t Swallow It!”

It was lamenting the lack of a BS detector on the internet and how easily factoids can spread misinformation. Today’s little gem fits right in with that theme.

The latest round of “Fish oil No Good for Heart Disease” studies was published this week by the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).  The NEJM has long been considered the pinnacle of medical journals the world over. It is of course solely supported by Big Pharma advertising.

Like the other big Journals, JAMA and the Archives of Internal Medicine, it maintains an “anti-supplement” stance, rarely publishing anything positive about anything that is not a Big Pharma drug.

Since most allopathic doctors do not apply critical standards to what is published in these journals, the word of these journals is gospel.

Not surprisingly the latest “Fish oil no Good For…” study will get a lot of air time and be virally spread on the internet with even less critical thinking and even more acceptance from the general populace.

One site that repeats internet nonsense is already saying, “The pendulum is swinging away from fish oil!”

While I don’t normally bother with this because it has been coming and going for the past 10 years, I will admit there really seems to be an “anti-fish oil” campaign out there.

The “Just eat fish” crowd has conveniently forgotten the issues of lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium and plastic-derived xenoestrogens and toxins that are found in most oily fish in quantity. A few have even suggested that the “other oils” in fish, the stuff that is not EPA and DHA, have value. They sure do!

They are valuable for calories! They make no contribution to the biochemical pathways and are otherwise non-essential, however.

Getting back to the study aspect of things, I’ve said it a thousand times but I am forced to say it yet again.

Any study that does not…

1)      Use a dose of fish oil that actually matters

2)      Does not measure blood or tissue levels (the finger stick Ideal Omega test is soooooooooooooo simple but they don’t bother!)

3)      Attempt to achieve the ratios of Omega 6 to Omega 3 that parallel the populations that have almost NO HEART DISEASE compared to ours. (It’s in the neighborhood of a 10 fold reduction).

…IS DESIGNED TO FAIL

So let’s look at the particulars of the study:

A)     Dose?  1 gram.   The study population was Italian, clearly a Waster diet based group.  No, they were not on the “Mediterranean Diet”, a Health/Marketing concept created by Dean Ornish. They were clearly eating pasta!

B)     “Eligible patients were men and women with multiple cardiovascular risk factors or atherosclerotic vascular disease but not myocardial infarction.”  In other words, they were ticking time bombs waiting to have their heart attacks. Their doctors already knew they had heart disease in many cases.

C)     What was the type of fish oil administered? It does not say; so it could easily have been a non-concentrated “natural cold pressed triglyceride” fish oil, which provides only 30% EPA and DHA. I need to try to find this out because it makes a huge difference.

Why? Because they may have actually been only getting 300 mg of the active oils for cardiac disease prevention. You have heard me say the average Westerner needs at least 6 grams a day to fix their Omega 3 deficit and balance out their excess Omega 6’s.

D)     No levels were measured in these people – if they were, they would not have even scratched the surface with the dosages they chose to give people.

E)      The GISSI Prevenzione study also done in Italy over a decade ago using 2 to 3 grams a day of the highly concentrated ethyl ester form, like mine, (still an under dosage but better than this one) showed a far different 35% reduction in Cardiovascular Death.

Two other things of note: The placebo was Olive oil, which is appropriate since Olive oil is Omega 6 dominant (21 to 1 Omega 6 to Omega 3).  Next, they had to fiddle with their chosen end point: “At one year, after the event rate was found to be lower than anticipated, the primary end point was revised as time to death from cardiovascular causes or admission to the hospital for cardiovascular causes.”  This kind of last minute post study fiddling makes the entire study questionable in my opinion!

At least this was a study, however, and not a “meta analysis” – a computer generated file based on cherry picked data that can prove anything the authors want without spending more than a few dollars in computer time and many hours of doctoral candidate slave labor!

So what should this study have been titled?

Here’s mine:

UNDER DOSING WITH FISH OIL IN A HIGH RISK POPULATION DOES NO GOOD TO PREVENT THE PROGRESSION OF HEART DISEASE

Frankly, this kind of study, done in an era where the data already exists for both primary and secondary prevention with Omega 3’s, constitutes malpractice in my opinion.

Also, I am not insensitive to the fact that my study title would probably not get many people to be interested, so here is another one which might intrigue the reader more – something you have to do for a sound bite society.

I would call it the Educated Authors Trying to Suppress Healthy Interventions Trial. You may be aware it is customary in medicine to use the first letter of every capitalized letter in a trial to create an acronym for the trial’s name. I will leave you to that.

I will also comment that acronym is pretty much my opinion of this study, which was designed to fail, adds nothing to our knowledge base and will undoubtedly contribute to the misinformation database out there in cyberland.

Finally, I will say that if you actually do figure out the acronym based on what I told you above, you might anticipate a new Meta analysis that will tell you this practice is actually healthy for you! I doubt it will make it into the NEJM, however, unless there is a Big Pharma drug somehow involved.

Don’t swallow it!!!!

Doc

 

Reference articles:  n–3 Fatty Acids in Patients with Multiple Cardiovascular Risk Factors

The Risk and Prevention Study Collaborative Group

N Engl J Med 2013; 368:1800-1808 May 9, 2013 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1205409

J Toxicol Environ Health A. 2007 Nov;70(22):1897-911.

Heavy metals in Pacific cod (Gadus macrocephalus) from the Aleutians: location, age, size, and risk.

Burger J, Gochfeld M, Shukla T, Jeitner C, Burke S, Donio M, Shukla S, Snigaroff R, Snigaroff D, Stamm T, Volz C.

Source

Division of Life Sciences, Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute, Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854-8082, USA

“If a subsistence fisher from one of the Aleut villages ate one meal of cod per week for As, or one meal per day for Hg, they would exceed the U.S. EPA reference dose for As and Hg” As is Arsenic, HG is mercury!