A book called A Million of Facts by Sir Richard Philips published around 1839 states on page 148 "Riley asserts that Arabs, in the desert liver for 200 years."
Some people have stated that military medical experiments on fasting carried out around the time of WW2 to learn how best to deal with starved prisoners of war, have shown moles on the skin have shriveled up and disappeared, and grey hair has also returned to its natural colour amongst other rejuvenating effects. A variety of studies have shown improvements in the body, ranging from increased spatial intelligence (ghrelin the hunger hormone) to better survival rates when undergoing various cancer treatment protocols. Loads can be found using google scholar, but heres just one recent example.
On the point of lysosomal enzymes, if fasting, once the body has digested the food in the digestive tract usually 3 days, around day 3-5 it goes into a ketogenic state, in fact a ketogenic diet is sometimes used in cancer treatments to increase the effectiveness of the protocol, although it certainly helps deal with the toxic side effects of some protocols.
Interestingly some lysosomal enzymes are only activated after 10 days of fasting, today how many people fast for this length of time?
I cant help but notice some parallels with Lent, in the distant past before modern medicine, Lent was about fasting, today its only about giving up something for a period of time. I also cant help but notice that when Jesus was crucified, he would have been effectively fasting on the cross whilst also being exposed to copious amounts of sunshine leading to an increase in Vit D, although the nitric oxide is the most notable short term effect as it takes Vit D about 14 days to become activated in the body afters its been processed by the kidney's and liver where all your fat soluble vitamins are stored.
After Jesus was taken down from the cross, and banged up in a dark cave, melatonin would have increased effectively helping him to come back from the dead!
Bear in mind modern medicine was around back then so whilst it can only be considered supposition, there are some circumstances which could have ...
Not coherent I'd agree. The comment implied that prolonged exposure to sunlight would cause large amounts of vit D to accumulate, which would have certain presumed effects.
A couple of problems with that "theory". Vit D is produced in the skin by conversion of precursors on exposure to UVB radiation in sunlight. However, the amount of vit D in total is bounded by the quantity of substrate and rate limiting as vit D is produced. Therefore sun exposure never produces excessive systemic levels of vit D.
Furthermore, human residents of the biblical era in the holy land would likely have good vit D storage levels by default. Additional sunlight would not materially increase circulating D level.
Theres so much to talk about on this subject ie longevity of life it can come across as incoherent, its very much a case of where do you begin, because the human body is very complicated. The interactions between medicines you may be prescribed by your Dr is not even complete.
I did an experiment a few years back working on laptop outside in just shorts during UK summer. I got my levels up to just under 500nmol/L (478nmol/L iirc) verified by the Vit D centre at the NHS Birmingham and Sandwell using their blood spot tests, sending one of their bloodspot tests to them a month. http://www.vitamindtest.org.uk/vitamindbackground.html
200-220nmol/L is considered the safe upper limit, 500nmol/L is considered toxic, I was warned if I went higher I could get sarcoidosis which is granulation of the lungs amongst other things. However the NHS medical person who has a PhD in Vit D that worked there, who I had a lengthy conversation with on this topic didnt know the role iodine plays at killing cells in sarcodosis, only hypothosised in Greece in 2013 and didnt know about the 1937 study of how water washed off pre-vit D from the skin.
Likewise if you get too much 25(O)HD circulating other risks to health include hypercalcemia, ie too much calcium circulating in the blood which can lead to things like stones and other problems.
As Vit D increases the absorption of calcium from the diet/gut, you then need the fat soluble vit K to move the calcium from the blood to the bones as Vit K increases oesteoblasts (bone building), or increase iodine so the thyroid can release more calcitonin (amongst other hormones) which gives you a similar effect to Vit K. Your diet also affects what you produce as well, my diet is generally ketogenic. Your liver produces around 80% of the cholesterol which is needed to become Vit D. In fact a study in the UK done sometime in the 50's showed British gardeners had lower cholesterol levels, so you can lower your cholesterol by getting some sun. Of course if you have damaged your liver through excess alcohol, smoking or drugs then your liver is not working at optimum and thus you need to increase your dietary cholesterol intake whilst also increasing your consumption of B vits to help the liver regenerate as its the only organ that regenerates naturally and this is how they used to treat people with liver cirrhosis in the early 1900's.
As mentioned above with Vit D, theres a few different forms of Vit D and Vit K to name a few, in fact one Japanese study showed Vit K2 MK4 is used to treat post menopausal women for osteoporosis but then reducing vit k is used to thin the blood to prevent heart attacks. Fat soluble vits have a have life in the liver, Vit A has the longest half life, followed by vit D, then E then K with some forms of Vit K only lasting for a few minutes to hours to a few days depending on which form of vit K it is.
Anyway whilst I have seen studies to suggest the Vit D is rate limited by your body, I proved its still possible to get above what medical experts consider the natural limits in the body. You see melanin the skin pigment/tan converts 99.9% of UV radiation into heat, the skin cancer risk comes from burning too much, you want to build the tan little and often to maintain the tan all year round, but melatonin whitens the skin. UVA reactivates melanin, UVB creates new melanin. Copper stored in your liver is oxidised to become melanin. Likewise if you dont have enough Vit A your skin wont produce enough oil which becomes UV radiated and is where you find the pre-vitamin D, likewise showering even in just water every day washes off the pre-vitamin D, so I dont agree with some of things Hollick (arguably the worlds leading expert on Vit D) says, plus there is the cholesterol angle to also help increase Vit D. Your brain is made up of a large amount of cholesterol as well, which is why some studies have shown some statins make pe...
> The sleep hormone melatonin increases the release of mesenchymal stem cells, and is also more effective as an antioxidant than say Vitamin C amongst other things
So you should make sure not to have any if you get cancer.
Melatonin is useful for treating some forms of cancer, like breast cancer, but I also saw someone suggest women wearing bra's increase the risk of breast cancer, possibly due to the restrictions placed on the lymph nodes under the arm pit. Moving and exercising to flush/pump the lymph around the body to the nodes which are all pretty much located where folds in the body occur, ie pits, groin, backs of knees and so on seems to be the way this works. Bra's restrict the circulation under the pits, hence the increase in breast cancer, but not the only factor as seen with women doing late nights, more alcohol and drugs compared to a generation ago.
Lymph seems to be a passive system ie its not pumped like blood is.
Melatonin is good for a variety of reasons which is probably why its called beauty sleep, its also one of the few substances that can cross the blood brain barrier like caffeine does, and that in turn increases dopamine.
Interestingly some lysosomal enzymes are only activated after 10 days of fasting, today how many people fast for this length of time?
This is super interesting. What is the source for the 10 days number - is it in the article you linked? Do you know where I can get full text - it is behind a paywall for me.
I was always interested how long does it take to get most benefits out of fasting, but research on anything over 72 hours is very scarce.
Animal studies again. Nothing wrong with that, I'm convinced that fasting has a range of benefits, but human studies would be just so much more interesting.
Still looking for the source of the 10 day figure for lysosomal enzymes and humans.
The source matters because there are two common types of vitamin D: D2 and D3. Sunlight lets you produce D3, while supplements are typically D2.
In food that's been fortified, it will probably have D2, while food that has natural vitamin D (like fatty fish) will probably have D3.
Although the two forms are metabolized through different mechanisms, the difference is negligible for most people. However, for some people (depending on genetics, diet, or lifestyle), supplemental Vitamin D2 will not be an adequate replacement for Vitamin D3.
Alot of the oil based D3 supplements are obtained from the fleeces of sheep. The risk with this is what the organophosphates and other chemicals, sheep are dipped in before being shorn that might also be present in supplements, plus some supplements dont even contain the claimed/stated ui/mcg amounts of d3.
I prefer the sun or lying under my UVB lizard flo tubes for an hour a day.
If you do want to get high levels of d3 in your body, make sure you also increase at least your zinc, magnesium, and eating your greens, brussel sprouts, parsely or iodine rich sea food like seaweed will all help, but you really need to be in tune with your body and its cravings to know what your body wants.
http://nutritiondata.self.com/foods-000104000000000000000-w....
Some foods and drink will blunt or dull your food cravings like sugar.
Vit D2 is not as beneficial as D3 to humans, but you get D2 from some plants like mushrooms exposed to UV light.
You have to bear in mind humans like all life on this planet has evolved under the sun over millions of years. Life evolves to cope with the environment it lives in, ie survival of the fittest.
BTW if you want to be naturally exposed to anthrax, get friendly with some sheep.
Thing is though, its not just Vit D people should be focused on, in general its a healthy balanced diet with plenty of sunshine and exercise which is best.
This chap, http://www.creditonparishchurch.org.uk/history/sir-john-de-s... is an example of how long life can be gained even when the life expectancy all those years ago was relatively low due to the statistics and infant mortality which dragged down the life expectancy see back in medieval times.
"But the cell has an enzyme called telomerase, which carries out the task of adding repetitive nucleotide sequences to the ends of the DNA. Telomerase, thus, 'replenishes' the telomere 'cap' of the DNA. In most multicellular eukaryotic organisms, telomerase is active only in germ cells, some types of stem cells such as embryonic stem cells, and certain white blood cells."
In addition to the healthy, normal repair of telomeres in germ cells, they're also replenished in cancer cells. While probably not a sufficient condition for cancer, it's almost a necessary one. So just over expressing telomerase everywhere in a blind fashion is likely to have some side effects in at least some people.
There has been surprisingly little of cancer in mice with overexpression of telomerase. In fact mice with increased telomerase expression have less cancer, for reasons yet to be explored. Perhaps increased immune surveillance in old individuals, though that is pure speculation.
Still, mice and humans have different telomere dynamics, and so it is wise - I think - to be wary of the cancer risk question. More testing of telomerase overexpression needs to be done in other mammals with more human-like telomere dynamics.
So maybe the genes for reduction of telomerase have evolved because by (older individuals) dying the survival of newer individuals (who are offspring of those) is facilitated due to less competition for resources?
Telomeres are lengthened in women when their eggs are made, while still in their mother's wombs. Men are constantly lengthening telomeres in the cells that form sperm. This is one reason why children of older men tend to live longer. Of course, this benefit only really comes from fathers in their late twenties, because otherwise other paterrnal-age-related pathologies can outweigh the benefits.
I wasn't aware of a higher paternal age ever being a good thing. Are there papers or articles on this? What's the "sweet spot" before genetic mutations in the germ line become a problem?
There aren't really stem cells floating around in the blood. The donation would likely still impose some cost on the stem cells though (I doubt anybody has much of a handle on that cost).
There is some evidence that frequent blood donors live longer than occasional donors. Being healthy is a selection criteria for blood donation, so it can be hard to study the impact.
Imagine the poor in possession of a self-replenishing resource that the rich might be interested in buying! But comfortable middle-class people might have reservations about the ethics of selling it!
Who cares about ssl when your country's spooks are running their own modified Bind servers (dns) having hacked your ISP switches routing you net traffic to their own look-a-likey servers where you think you are buying an ssl cert from a CA, or you are downloading a distro like tails or ubuntu from their own servers.
Hashes are useless if you have downloaded compromised software/distro/what have you from spook servers. Just hash the compromised software, the unthinking will see the hashes match but not realise what has been downloaded is already compromised.
The blood of infants no doubt. One female politician, in particular, probably gets daily transfusions from infants suspended upside down from IV stands. Sort of like the last Mad Max movie.
How do blood transfusions actually work? I assumed it was a temporary thing to allow your own blood cell generation to make up for whatever you lost; that transfused blood would cycle out normally or actually eventually be rejected as foreign.
That is a low number, but not the only example of limited resources in our systems.
Dopamine neurons in the brain are essential for normal functioning. Parkinson's develops when dopamine neurons die off with age or due to other injury (toxins, trauma, etc.). It takes only a 15% loss of these irreplaceable cells for the condition to begin to show up.
In contrast to the cortex of the brain with its 100's of millions of neurons, we are born with only 250K dopamine cells which are never regenerated.
That's a narrow margin to rely on, we skate on very thin ice throughout our lives. Nature is the staunchest conservative and doesn't throw away the things that work. Our bodies still retain the archaic mechanisms of the earliest multicellular organisms in our brains and bodies.
Looks like blood forming tissues are similarly following Nature's way.
Good evolution and good engineering principles are at odds.
In engineering an idea that has been found to work in one place gets adapted in another. Also you often build reliability through adding layers of redundancy.
Evolution has no straightforward way for good ideas to be identified and reapplied to another system. It has to evolve again. Also if you have two fully redundant systems, there is nothing to stop deleterious mutations from disrupting one of them. The end result is that one of the redundant systems will become unreliable, and then the other one gets maintained by selection pressure. (This is also why creatures that live in a cave eventually become blind, and parasites lose their ability to use now unnecessary body parts. There is no engineering reason why this would happen, but is a natural result of selection pressures being eliminated.)
Yep. This is actually one of the better arguments against Intelligent Design: the human body (and in fact all living things) has too many faults and shortcomings to have been designed by an omnipotent, omniscient being. (Of course, it could be argued that said shortcomings are intentional and were part of the design specs, but considering how much pain and suffering they cause (e.g. cancer), it would go against the claim that the designer is omnibenevolent).
"Good evolution" is essentially devoting the maximum amount of (usually very limited) resources towards successful procreation and rearing offspring.
Hence the "features" or "redundancy" which would otherwise consume resources and not significantly affect procreation chances (like your cave example) eventually get selected against and disappear.
"Good Engineering" on the other hand usually devotes additional resources to redundancy, fault-tolerances, which do not necessarily offer a competitive advantage in procreation.
> "Good evolution" is essentially devoting the maximum amount of (usually very limited) resources towards successful procreation and rearing offspring.
It's not that simple. If producing the maximum amount of offspring were the goal, populations of a species would quickly collapse. It's also a poor principle to explain social behavior and organisms living in hives or strictly hierarchically procreating groups.
A much better model principle would be, that evolution optimizes for maximum probability of the _offspring_ to successfully procreate. By adding this layer of indirection a lot more of what we can observe in biology can be explained with less presumptions (Occam's Razor).
I can't help it, but as a physicist the first thing I look at are orders of magnitude and relations in orders of magnitude. And given the total number of cells in a (human) body (~10^13 according to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23829164) compared to the number of stem cells stated in the article that'd would be 10 orders of magnitude in between. Just talking about red blood cells it's still a staggering 10^12 / 10^3, i.e. 9 orders of magnitude. And for white blood cells it's 10^9/10^3, i.e. 6 orders of magnitude.
Next question: Does the number of stem cells scale with body mass? Because if that's the case then I give you the Naked Mole Rat (aka the penis with teeth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole-rat ). The Naked Mole Rat is _THE_ model organism for longevity, completely defying extrapolation of ageing models. The average Naked Mole Rat weighs about 30g, the average human weighs about 75kg. So a Naked Mole Rat hat about 1/2000th the body mass of a human. Assuming a mass proportional stem cell count that would make about 1000 stem cells in total and 0.5 stem cells replenishing blood cells at any given moment.
Where does these 20000 and 1000 figures come from in the first place? Given my personal experience in TA-ing students of medicine and biology I don't have a lot of confidence in their calculation abilities. These students manage to get their figures wrong by several orders of magnitude on a regular base. So I'd not be surprised if these figures are grossly underestimated.
IIRC there was a doctor posting in other threads about his bone-marrow stem cell banking startup. My understanding was that these stem cells were stored when young, and could be multiplied in a lab environment and then re-injected therapeutically (to cure MS or arthritis or whatever). Would these kind of banked stem cells (say, banked in one's early or late twenties) also potentially assist with life extension?
Yea I saw that thread and it left me wondering what problems there might be with the process for "expansion" of the extracted stem cells as he called it.
It helps to think about the basics when talking about telomere length and cell behavior.
1) Telomeres shorten with each cell division in ordinary somatic cells. When they get too short, cells self-destruct or stop dividing. So average telomere length in tissue is a function of cell division rates.
2) Stem cells support their associated tissue type by providing new cells with long telomeres. Thus average telomere length is also a function of cell replacement rates.
3) Average telomere length is at present usually measured in white blood cells. The rates of division and replacement here are tied in to many factors, including general health, autoimmunity, infection, state of the thymus, and so on and so forth. It would probably be better to use another tissue, such as skin, but that isn't the way things worked out in practice.
So telomere length is far removed from first causes in aging - it is largely a marker, largely of stem cell function in most tissues, but in immune cells with their varying rates of division according to circumstances, also a marker of all sorts of other unrelated or partly related things.
If telomere length is globally extended, you have cells that can divide more often without the need for stem cell support, and you also have more energetic stem cells. But those cells dividing more often are more damaged on average. This may or may not be important enough to do bad things such as raise cancer risk significantly in our species: more data needed.
From an engineering perspective what are the MTBFs for the various human components; are a dearth of White blood cells a prime reason for aging and death?
Great progress has been made in genetics surely one could read the DNA of a few thousand cells and have an extremely strong confidence of what the unmutated DNA for a person once was.
And from this you could make new white blood cells et voila.
This all seems rather Blade Runnery. Mind you there would be societal problems with people who can live much older: slowing of cultural evolution, career blocking, and monopolising property; we've got that now but it would get worse.
I'm worried about the Brexiters kicking out the metric system;that and fascist tyranny.
From an engineering point of view, there has been some work on the application of reliability theory to aging, though not to the point where your question can be answered using this approach:
Immune system aging is an important component of age-related frailty, and probably also accounts for the rising number of senescent cells and higher cancer risk. It isn't as simple as a dearth of cells, however. It is more of a complex configuration/whole-system failure in which rate of cell replacement is just one variable contributing to the bad state endpoint. See for example:
From an engineering point of view, this article is an oversimplification. Check out http://www.sens.org for a more comprehensive and sophisticated approach.
Blood storage for autologous transfusion has apparently already been a thing for a while[1] and has been indicated to be effective in animal experiments[2], but as far as I can tell, no provider is willing to store it for more than about 20 years (and what is stored may not in fact contain stem cells, but rather only something that spurs the existing ones into activity). My general impression is that the medical community's moral gut reaction is unfavourable towards the idea.
Looks interesting. Unfortunately, I'm not sure my prior probability that a random startup would survive for sufficiently long to be of use to future me is sufficiently high to justify whatever cost their services would come at...
If stem cells are finite & small in number. And you have some removed to be preserved for later life... Then maybe you will have problems due to having fewer stem cells?
Stem cells are a part of it, but there is much more to it. For a realistic, comprehensive, and much more informed approach to aging research, see http://www.sens.org.
They aren't engaged in general, "aging," research actually, DeGray has stated he's interested in life-extension technology, to the extent that it might be possible. Their goal, as stated on the website you just linked to, is as follows:
> Our goal is to help build the industry that will cure the diseases of aging.
I'm not saying you're wrong...I just think there's some confusion online as to what they really are trying to do. They don't research aging in general, which would imply they are a University Body whose sole function is research for the purpose of research...they are specifically attempting to create a kind of science, which may or may not be valid, by funding certain types of research done by recognized research institutions, with the hope that evidence will support what they believe to be true...sort of like how the Koch brothers fund all sorts of research hoping to poke all sorts of holes and nuances into the accepted version of how climate change is understood. They may very well come up with something interesting, informed, and comprehensive...but that does not mean that they are being realistic. In research you don't get to choose whether your hypothesis is realistic or not...you just sort of go out into the woods and start picking things up and seeing whether what you think the laws of nature are...really are true...but you could be completely wrong and you might find nothing. You don't get to choose whether you catch a fish...you may come back to shore with zero fish after fishing for 50 years...or 100 years...or an infinite number of years.
SENS isn't new science. It is a synthesis of existing evidence for what causes aging and age-related disease, pulled in from many branches of medical research. The original contributions are the high level view of damage repair as the guiding basis for treatment, plus specific plans for how to address these causes.
I don't think you can say it's wrong in wholesale at this point, given where things stand. The mainstream position in the aging research community is that aging is caused by an accumulation of damage.
Senescent cell clearance has been on the SENS agenda since day one, with plenty of evidence to back it as a cause of aging from the past decades of research. Life extension has been demonstrated in mice through senescent cell clearance. There are two funded startups moving senescent cell clearance therapies to the clinic.
You'll also find it hard to argue against the proposition that amyloid causes specific age-related conditions. E.g. amyloid beta in Alzheimer's disease, transthyretin amyloid in heart disease. These are very mainstream concerns.
Similarly, there are few objections to the idea that declining stem cell function is a cause of aging, and plenty of evidence to show that restoring stem cell activity is beneficial.
78 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadCan you point me at a reference for this info?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7083323.stm
The sleep hormone melatonin increases the release of mesenchymal stem cells, and is also more effective as an antioxidant than say Vitamin C amongst other things. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24650016 http://www.benbest.com/nutrceut/melatonin.html#aging
A book called A Million of Facts by Sir Richard Philips published around 1839 states on page 148 "Riley asserts that Arabs, in the desert liver for 200 years."
Lots of UVB in the desert!
The Welcome Trust in Aug 2010 stated there are 2,776 binding sites for the Vitamin D Receptor in the Human Genome, most of which are concentrated around the immune system genes. https://wellcome.ac.uk/press-release/vitamin-d-found-influen...
Yes genes can change in the body.
Water Fasting is also the other major factor in long life as your lysosomal enzymes come into play. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysosome
Some people have stated that military medical experiments on fasting carried out around the time of WW2 to learn how best to deal with starved prisoners of war, have shown moles on the skin have shriveled up and disappeared, and grey hair has also returned to its natural colour amongst other rejuvenating effects. A variety of studies have shown improvements in the body, ranging from increased spatial intelligence (ghrelin the hunger hormone) to better survival rates when undergoing various cancer treatment protocols. Loads can be found using google scholar, but heres just one recent example.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/12/fasting-for-th...
On the point of lysosomal enzymes, if fasting, once the body has digested the food in the digestive tract usually 3 days, around day 3-5 it goes into a ketogenic state, in fact a ketogenic diet is sometimes used in cancer treatments to increase the effectiveness of the protocol, although it certainly helps deal with the toxic side effects of some protocols.
http://stm.sciencemag.org/node/186102.full
Interestingly some lysosomal enzymes are only activated after 10 days of fasting, today how many people fast for this length of time?
I cant help but notice some parallels with Lent, in the distant past before modern medicine, Lent was about fasting, today its only about giving up something for a period of time. I also cant help but notice that when Jesus was crucified, he would have been effectively fasting on the cross whilst also being exposed to copious amounts of sunshine leading to an increase in Vit D, although the nitric oxide is the most notable short term effect as it takes Vit D about 14 days to become activated in the body afters its been processed by the kidney's and liver where all your fat soluble vitamins are stored.
After Jesus was taken down from the cross, and banged up in a dark cave, melatonin would have increased effectively helping him to come back from the dead! Bear in mind modern medicine was around back then so whilst it can only be considered supposition, there are some circumstances which could have ...
A couple of problems with that "theory". Vit D is produced in the skin by conversion of precursors on exposure to UVB radiation in sunlight. However, the amount of vit D in total is bounded by the quantity of substrate and rate limiting as vit D is produced. Therefore sun exposure never produces excessive systemic levels of vit D.
Furthermore, human residents of the biblical era in the holy land would likely have good vit D storage levels by default. Additional sunlight would not materially increase circulating D level.
I did an experiment a few years back working on laptop outside in just shorts during UK summer. I got my levels up to just under 500nmol/L (478nmol/L iirc) verified by the Vit D centre at the NHS Birmingham and Sandwell using their blood spot tests, sending one of their bloodspot tests to them a month. http://www.vitamindtest.org.uk/vitamindbackground.html
200-220nmol/L is considered the safe upper limit, 500nmol/L is considered toxic, I was warned if I went higher I could get sarcoidosis which is granulation of the lungs amongst other things. However the NHS medical person who has a PhD in Vit D that worked there, who I had a lengthy conversation with on this topic didnt know the role iodine plays at killing cells in sarcodosis, only hypothosised in Greece in 2013 and didnt know about the 1937 study of how water washed off pre-vit D from the skin.
Likewise if you get too much 25(O)HD circulating other risks to health include hypercalcemia, ie too much calcium circulating in the blood which can lead to things like stones and other problems.
As Vit D increases the absorption of calcium from the diet/gut, you then need the fat soluble vit K to move the calcium from the blood to the bones as Vit K increases oesteoblasts (bone building), or increase iodine so the thyroid can release more calcitonin (amongst other hormones) which gives you a similar effect to Vit K. Your diet also affects what you produce as well, my diet is generally ketogenic. Your liver produces around 80% of the cholesterol which is needed to become Vit D. In fact a study in the UK done sometime in the 50's showed British gardeners had lower cholesterol levels, so you can lower your cholesterol by getting some sun. Of course if you have damaged your liver through excess alcohol, smoking or drugs then your liver is not working at optimum and thus you need to increase your dietary cholesterol intake whilst also increasing your consumption of B vits to help the liver regenerate as its the only organ that regenerates naturally and this is how they used to treat people with liver cirrhosis in the early 1900's.
As mentioned above with Vit D, theres a few different forms of Vit D and Vit K to name a few, in fact one Japanese study showed Vit K2 MK4 is used to treat post menopausal women for osteoporosis but then reducing vit k is used to thin the blood to prevent heart attacks. Fat soluble vits have a have life in the liver, Vit A has the longest half life, followed by vit D, then E then K with some forms of Vit K only lasting for a few minutes to hours to a few days depending on which form of vit K it is.
Anyway whilst I have seen studies to suggest the Vit D is rate limited by your body, I proved its still possible to get above what medical experts consider the natural limits in the body. You see melanin the skin pigment/tan converts 99.9% of UV radiation into heat, the skin cancer risk comes from burning too much, you want to build the tan little and often to maintain the tan all year round, but melatonin whitens the skin. UVA reactivates melanin, UVB creates new melanin. Copper stored in your liver is oxidised to become melanin. Likewise if you dont have enough Vit A your skin wont produce enough oil which becomes UV radiated and is where you find the pre-vitamin D, likewise showering even in just water every day washes off the pre-vitamin D, so I dont agree with some of things Hollick (arguably the worlds leading expert on Vit D) says, plus there is the cholesterol angle to also help increase Vit D. Your brain is made up of a large amount of cholesterol as well, which is why some studies have shown some statins make pe...
So you should make sure not to have any if you get cancer.
Lymph seems to be a passive system ie its not pumped like blood is.
Melatonin is good for a variety of reasons which is probably why its called beauty sleep, its also one of the few substances that can cross the blood brain barrier like caffeine does, and that in turn increases dopamine.
Interestingly some lysosomal enzymes are only activated after 10 days of fasting, today how many people fast for this length of time?
This is super interesting. What is the source for the 10 days number - is it in the article you linked? Do you know where I can get full text - it is behind a paywall for me.
I was always interested how long does it take to get most benefits out of fasting, but research on anything over 72 hours is very scarce.
Edit: found it here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3608686/
Animal studies again. Nothing wrong with that, I'm convinced that fasting has a range of benefits, but human studies would be just so much more interesting.
Still looking for the source of the 10 day figure for lysosomal enzymes and humans.
In food that's been fortified, it will probably have D2, while food that has natural vitamin D (like fatty fish) will probably have D3.
Although the two forms are metabolized through different mechanisms, the difference is negligible for most people. However, for some people (depending on genetics, diet, or lifestyle), supplemental Vitamin D2 will not be an adequate replacement for Vitamin D3.
[0] http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/84/4/694.full
I prefer the sun or lying under my UVB lizard flo tubes for an hour a day.
If you do want to get high levels of d3 in your body, make sure you also increase at least your zinc, magnesium, and eating your greens, brussel sprouts, parsely or iodine rich sea food like seaweed will all help, but you really need to be in tune with your body and its cravings to know what your body wants. http://nutritiondata.self.com/foods-000104000000000000000-w....
Some foods and drink will blunt or dull your food cravings like sugar.
Vit D2 is not as beneficial as D3 to humans, but you get D2 from some plants like mushrooms exposed to UV light.
You have to bear in mind humans like all life on this planet has evolved under the sun over millions of years. Life evolves to cope with the environment it lives in, ie survival of the fittest.
BTW if you want to be naturally exposed to anthrax, get friendly with some sheep.
Thing is though, its not just Vit D people should be focused on, in general its a healthy balanced diet with plenty of sunshine and exercise which is best.
This chap, http://www.creditonparishchurch.org.uk/history/sir-john-de-s... is an example of how long life can be gained even when the life expectancy all those years ago was relatively low due to the statistics and infant mortality which dragged down the life expectancy see back in medieval times.
Because every individual started with one single cell, from a father and mother cells that also underwent cell division
Hence at some point in time these telomeres get rebuilt/replenished.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere#Structure.2C_function...
Still, mice and humans have different telomere dynamics, and so it is wise - I think - to be wary of the cancer risk question. More testing of telomerase overexpression needs to be done in other mammals with more human-like telomere dynamics.
So maybe the genes for reduction of telomerase have evolved because by (older individuals) dying the survival of newer individuals (who are offspring of those) is facilitated due to less competition for resources?
Of course high paternal age also has other risks, but there's a sweet spot sometime between 25 and 30.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centenarian
There is some evidence that frequent blood donors live longer than occasional donors. Being healthy is a selection criteria for blood donation, so it can be hard to study the impact.
http://sciencenordic.com/frequent-blood-donors-live-longer
http://www.bloodjournal.org/content/bloodjournal/98/10/2900....
Having a blood transfusion from someone younger than you will increase longevity.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/may/04/young-blood-...
So it pays to be a vampire!
http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/david-rockefellers-sixth-hea...
Maybe this would be better? http://www.academia.edu/12568086/DAVID_ROCKEFELLER_S_SIXTH_H...
Hashes are useless if you have downloaded compromised software/distro/what have you from spook servers. Just hash the compromised software, the unthinking will see the hashes match but not realise what has been downloaded is already compromised.
It pays to plan decades ahead.
It’s estimated that we’re born with around 20,000 blood stem cells, and at any one time, around 1000 are simultaneously active to replenish blood.
I was surprised the number was so low. Interesting to think this relatively small number of little factories has to sustain us throughout life.
Dopamine neurons in the brain are essential for normal functioning. Parkinson's develops when dopamine neurons die off with age or due to other injury (toxins, trauma, etc.). It takes only a 15% loss of these irreplaceable cells for the condition to begin to show up.
In contrast to the cortex of the brain with its 100's of millions of neurons, we are born with only 250K dopamine cells which are never regenerated.
That's a narrow margin to rely on, we skate on very thin ice throughout our lives. Nature is the staunchest conservative and doesn't throw away the things that work. Our bodies still retain the archaic mechanisms of the earliest multicellular organisms in our brains and bodies.
Looks like blood forming tissues are similarly following Nature's way.
In engineering an idea that has been found to work in one place gets adapted in another. Also you often build reliability through adding layers of redundancy.
Evolution has no straightforward way for good ideas to be identified and reapplied to another system. It has to evolve again. Also if you have two fully redundant systems, there is nothing to stop deleterious mutations from disrupting one of them. The end result is that one of the redundant systems will become unreliable, and then the other one gets maintained by selection pressure. (This is also why creatures that live in a cave eventually become blind, and parasites lose their ability to use now unnecessary body parts. There is no engineering reason why this would happen, but is a natural result of selection pressures being eliminated.)
Hence the "features" or "redundancy" which would otherwise consume resources and not significantly affect procreation chances (like your cave example) eventually get selected against and disappear.
"Good Engineering" on the other hand usually devotes additional resources to redundancy, fault-tolerances, which do not necessarily offer a competitive advantage in procreation.
It's not that simple. If producing the maximum amount of offspring were the goal, populations of a species would quickly collapse. It's also a poor principle to explain social behavior and organisms living in hives or strictly hierarchically procreating groups.
A much better model principle would be, that evolution optimizes for maximum probability of the _offspring_ to successfully procreate. By adding this layer of indirection a lot more of what we can observe in biology can be explained with less presumptions (Occam's Razor).
My post was just layman speculation, as I'm not a biologist/ecologist.
Next question: Does the number of stem cells scale with body mass? Because if that's the case then I give you the Naked Mole Rat (aka the penis with teeth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole-rat ). The Naked Mole Rat is _THE_ model organism for longevity, completely defying extrapolation of ageing models. The average Naked Mole Rat weighs about 30g, the average human weighs about 75kg. So a Naked Mole Rat hat about 1/2000th the body mass of a human. Assuming a mass proportional stem cell count that would make about 1000 stem cells in total and 0.5 stem cells replenishing blood cells at any given moment.
Where does these 20000 and 1000 figures come from in the first place? Given my personal experience in TA-ing students of medicine and biology I don't have a lot of confidence in their calculation abilities. These students manage to get their figures wrong by several orders of magnitude on a regular base. So I'd not be surprised if these figures are grossly underestimated.
1) Telomeres shorten with each cell division in ordinary somatic cells. When they get too short, cells self-destruct or stop dividing. So average telomere length in tissue is a function of cell division rates.
2) Stem cells support their associated tissue type by providing new cells with long telomeres. Thus average telomere length is also a function of cell replacement rates.
3) Average telomere length is at present usually measured in white blood cells. The rates of division and replacement here are tied in to many factors, including general health, autoimmunity, infection, state of the thymus, and so on and so forth. It would probably be better to use another tissue, such as skin, but that isn't the way things worked out in practice.
So telomere length is far removed from first causes in aging - it is largely a marker, largely of stem cell function in most tissues, but in immune cells with their varying rates of division according to circumstances, also a marker of all sorts of other unrelated or partly related things.
If telomere length is globally extended, you have cells that can divide more often without the need for stem cell support, and you also have more energetic stem cells. But those cells dividing more often are more damaged on average. This may or may not be important enough to do bad things such as raise cancer risk significantly in our species: more data needed.
From an engineering perspective what are the MTBFs for the various human components; are a dearth of White blood cells a prime reason for aging and death?
Great progress has been made in genetics surely one could read the DNA of a few thousand cells and have an extremely strong confidence of what the unmutated DNA for a person once was.
And from this you could make new white blood cells et voila.
This all seems rather Blade Runnery. Mind you there would be societal problems with people who can live much older: slowing of cultural evolution, career blocking, and monopolising property; we've got that now but it would get worse.
I'm worried about the Brexiters kicking out the metric system;that and fascist tyranny.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_theory_of_aging_an...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20469937
Immune system aging is an important component of age-related frailty, and probably also accounts for the rising number of senescent cells and higher cancer risk. It isn't as simple as a dearth of cells, however. It is more of a complex configuration/whole-system failure in which rate of cell replacement is just one variable contributing to the bad state endpoint. See for example:
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/12/when-and-how-doe...
https://longevityandhealthspan.biomedcentral.com/articles/10...
So there are a finite number of T cells, and nearly all of them are used up fighting Cytomegalovirus?
[1] http://www.bloodbook.com/storage.html [2] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329831-400-young-bl...
[0] http://www.foreverlabs.co/
> Our goal is to help build the industry that will cure the diseases of aging.
I'm not saying you're wrong...I just think there's some confusion online as to what they really are trying to do. They don't research aging in general, which would imply they are a University Body whose sole function is research for the purpose of research...they are specifically attempting to create a kind of science, which may or may not be valid, by funding certain types of research done by recognized research institutions, with the hope that evidence will support what they believe to be true...sort of like how the Koch brothers fund all sorts of research hoping to poke all sorts of holes and nuances into the accepted version of how climate change is understood. They may very well come up with something interesting, informed, and comprehensive...but that does not mean that they are being realistic. In research you don't get to choose whether your hypothesis is realistic or not...you just sort of go out into the woods and start picking things up and seeing whether what you think the laws of nature are...really are true...but you could be completely wrong and you might find nothing. You don't get to choose whether you catch a fish...you may come back to shore with zero fish after fishing for 50 years...or 100 years...or an infinite number of years.
I don't think you can say it's wrong in wholesale at this point, given where things stand. The mainstream position in the aging research community is that aging is caused by an accumulation of damage.
Senescent cell clearance has been on the SENS agenda since day one, with plenty of evidence to back it as a cause of aging from the past decades of research. Life extension has been demonstrated in mice through senescent cell clearance. There are two funded startups moving senescent cell clearance therapies to the clinic.
You'll also find it hard to argue against the proposition that amyloid causes specific age-related conditions. E.g. amyloid beta in Alzheimer's disease, transthyretin amyloid in heart disease. These are very mainstream concerns.
Similarly, there are few objections to the idea that declining stem cell function is a cause of aging, and plenty of evidence to show that restoring stem cell activity is beneficial.
And so on.