Wish you could reverse aging or at the very least, slow it down? Slowing it down may very well be possible now. First, let’s review how we age. Did you know each person is born with 10,000 telomere bases, which make up the telomeres (more on that later) on every cell you have. When you hit 5K, due to cell reproduction, it’s called the Hayflick. That’s the point where the cells can no longer replicate and the death process begins.
When these cells die, it causes what we know as aging. No one has figured out how to reverse aging, but someone has now figured out how to slow it down.
What does this mean? It means you will have normal functioning longer and do more of the things you are able to do when younger, thus improving your quality of life.
The bonus is you will also remain younger looking with less wrinkles. So, you may wish you had taken better care of yourself. Skin and hair improves, but the real magic is in slowing down the shortening of your telomeres (more on those later).
Sound too good to be true?
How to stop aging has been the lifelong question and passion of one man, whose team won a Nobel Prize, and he claims what he has discovered is the real deal. His discovery began with research examining each human cell, which causes aging.
Description: Front side (obverse) of one of the Nobel Prize medals in Physiology or Medicine awarded in 1950 to researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Eyes, skin, hair, bones. Each of our cells replicate at different speeds. Your entire skin will replicate in 120 days, whereas your bones would take about 7 years.
English: Created from PDB entry 2HY9 with VMD/Povray/imagemagick (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
There are parts that age faster because of it. If you have 10K telomere bases, and your skin has to replicate it keeps taking away bases, thus skin would age faster. Creams, even those with retinol do not affect telomeres.
There are currently only two products on the market that affect telomeres. This one is PRODUCT B.
The first huge doubleblind study is being done in Spain and the results will be published this Summer. MODERN SCIENCE will be releasing it.
English: Molecular structure of human POT1 bound to telomeric single-stranded DNA Español: Estructura molecular de la proteína POT1 humana unida al saliente de cadena simple del ADN telomérico. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Here’s How It Works: There is one place in the human body where cells are immortal and never age. That is the Reproductive System in women and men. When women are born, they are born with a certain number of egg cells.
That is why when you give birth, the baby cells aren’t the age of the parent, but a newborn. In your reproductive cells, you have a gene that creates an enzyme. This enzyme we’re talking about is telomerase.
Telomerase slows the shortening of your telomeres, which are located at the end of your chromosomes. Telomerase has the ability to tack on another base at the end of the telomere, preventing it from shortening.
They discovered every cell in the human body has this capability, but the gene for telomerase is turned off, so they began looking for the gene to turn telomerase back on. Telomerase is the enzyme that slows down the shortening of telomeres.
Andrews made it his life mission to find out how to activate the telomerase gene in people. He tested 304,000 compounds. Out of all them, he discovered 8 chemical compounds that would turn on the telomeres gene.
Harvard Medical School did some mice studies with them in vitro, where they forced the telomerase genes to turn on, and they were able to completely reverse the aging process –making old cells new again.
English: Illustration showing the action of Human Telomerase in lenghtening Telomeres. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
All 8 of the chemical compounds were toxic to humans, so they knew it wouldn’t translate to human trials, but it did confirm the theory that if you could turn on the telomerase gene, you could in fact, stop the human aging process.
From there, Andrews got in touch with John Anderson, a neutraceutical wiz from Isagenix and they tried 62 concoctions of different natural compounds.
They managed to get 7 of them to affect the telomerase gene. And a key point here is these were safe for humans. Since then, they’ve tested quite a few more and now there are 13 compounds that have met their criteria.
The product has been out for a year and a half and so far, all the studies are positive.
It’s about slowing the aging process. Your cells will be younger. It’s in a capsule form with various ingredients, which are completely safe. Two capsules in the morning, two at night with or without food. It takes about 4 months for the product to infiltrate your cell structure. They are also seeing some signs of increased mental clarity and recall. Some people had the color of their hair return or new hair growth.
In mice in the study with 75% brain size, after turning on telomerase their brains were back to 100%. This could prove to be promising for patients with Alzheimer’s disease.
I talked to Todd Walukiewicz, D.C., who has been exploring anti-aging. He is part of a chiropractic practice in the Pittsburgh area that has been taking a holistic approach to health for 22 years. He is a strong advocate of these healthy aging concepts, and explains it here.
“Telomeres are basically at the end of your chromosomes, which contain your DNA. Your chromosomes contain roughly a million components of your DNA. Back in the 1950’s, scientists discoverd 10,000 at the end, which do not contain DNA. These are the bases of the telomeres. If your DNA is analagous to your shoe lace, then the plastic end caps at the end of your shoe lace represent the telomeres at the end of the chromosome. Just as the end cap keeps the shoe lace from fraying, so it is with the telomeres at the end of your chromosome.”
All cells have the same number of bases that make up the telomeres. If you had a chain, a link in the chain would be the base.
What Dr. Bill Andrews found is every time your cells divide, the DNA has to replicate itself for the new cell. When that happens, some of the bases get destroyed or lost. That is actually what is responsible for the aging process. So this is the best thing to happen in the world of healthy aging to date.
Walukiewicz believes in PRODUCT B so much that he is using it himself, and making it available to his patients.
The product is being sold in Pittsburgh at TELOMERE PARTNERS, USA. It costs about $77.00 a month. Does that make it affordable only to the wealthy?
I asked Walukeiwicz this question, and he said there was one available prior and the cost of it was $3500./month. This caused people to complain it was only affordable to the rich.
So, PRODUCT B is very affordable to the general public. There are no existing plans to make it available at pharmacies or in any store. For now, it is only available to consumers at the places mentioned below.
It’s available from independent Isagenix distributors. Dr. Todd has been taking it for about a month.
Telomeres: biological functions, sequencing and aging (Photo credit: The Ernst Mayr Library)
What can people that take it expect?
People who have taken it have claimed it reversed graying hair, skin wrinkles, memory loss and have even reported improved eyesight. The only side effect is weight loss, which people actually like.
More on telomeres:
A telomere is a region of repetitive DNA at the end of a chromosome, which protects the end of the chromosome from deterioration.
Russian theorist Alexei Olovnikov was the first to recognize (1971) the problem of how chromosomes could replicate right to the tip, as such was impossible with replication in a 5′ to 3′ direction. To solve this and to accommodate Leonard Hayflick’s idea of limited somatic cell division, Olovnikov suggested that DNA sequences would be lost in every replicative phase until they reached a critical level, at which point cell division would stop.
During cell division, enzymes that duplicate the chromosome and its DNA cannot continue their duplication all the way to the end of the chromosome.
If cells divided without telomeres, they would lose the ends of their chromosomes, and the necessary information they contain. (In 1972, James Watson named this phenomenon the “end replication problem”.)
The telomeres are disposable buffers blocking the ends of the chromosomes and are consumed during cell division and replenished by an enzyme, the telomerase reverse transcriptase.
They have been likened to the aglets (tips) on the ends of shoelaces that keep them from fraying.
In 1975–1977, Blackburn, working as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University with Joseph Gall, discovered the unusual nature of telomeres, with their simple repeated DNA sequences composing chromosome ends. Their work was published in 1978.
The telomere shortening mechanism normally limits cells to a fixed number of divisions, and animal studies suggest that this is responsible for aging on the cellular level and sets a limit on lifespans.
Telomeres protect a cell’s chromosomes from fusing with each other or rearranging—abnormalities which can lead to cancer—and so cells are normally destroyed when their telomeres are consumed. Most cancers are the result of “immortal” cells which have ways of evading this programmed destruction.
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2009, press conference with the laureates: Carol W. Greider, Elizabeth Blackburn, and Jack W. Szostak. Svenska: Nobelpriset i fysiologi eller medicin, presskonferens med pristagare: Carol W. Greider, Elizabeth Blackburn och Jack Szostak. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak were awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase.
Further Reading
•Telomere Function
•Telomere Shortening
•Telomere Lengthening
•Telomere Measurement
•Systemic Telomere Length and Aging
•Telomeres and Cancer
Personally, MedCrunch believes your lifestyle and daily habits determine how well you age. The longer you have maintained these habits, the more youthful you will feel and look at any age. If you’ve been eating right and exercising since you were a kid –you’re far ahead of someone who picks it up later in life. Living a healthy and balanced lifestyle is key –in body, mind and spirit.
That said, if we can stop these telomeres we’re born with from fraying and dying prematurely, why not? I wouldn’t replace healthy habits with a capsule, but it could be a welcome addendum to it. The company fully endorses maintaining a healthy lifestyle while taking it. It’s a discovery that is certainly the closest we’ve ever gotten to reversing cell death which causes aging.
MedCrunch will follow this story and keep you updated on the latest developments. Send us any questions you may have, and we’ll get them answered. ~MD
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