Vitamin D and Omega-3 Slow Aging

Previously in DO-HEALTH (including all 2,157 participants), we reported that omega-3 alone reduced the rate of infections by 13% (ref. 22) and the rate of falls by 10% (ref. 23), and all three interventions combined showed a significant additive benefit on reducing prefrailty by 39% (ref. 24) and incident invasive cancer by 61% (ref. 25) over a 3-year follow-up. The aim of the DNAm analysis in DO-HEALTH Bio-Age was to assess the effects of the interventions at the molecular level. Three of th...

 Exercise Prevents Spending Calories on Fat Storage and Ot...

The reason for that is because exercise causes stress and that stress turns on a whole raft of beneficial effects. And there are really two kinds of this stress. Now, the first kind is energetic stress. Like I went for a run this morning, I spent probably about 500 calories running and I can only do so many things with the calories my body has. And if I spend 500 extra calories exercising, that means I'm not gonna spend 500 calories on other activities that my bother body might engage in. An...

 Exercise Creates Structural Stress

Now, the other kind of stress Structural stress from activity that physical activity cause is structural stress. Now, when I was running this morning, for example, my mitochondria were generating all kinds of ATP to fuel my body, but my mitochondria were also spewing out all kinds of reactive oxygen species, which cause widespread damage throughout my body. I was getting mutations in my DNA, those that damage is causing my telomeres at the end of my chromosomes to shorten its damaging cells. ...

 Why Humans Evolved to be Active

Humans of all to be much more physically active than our ape ancestors. Typical chimpanzee walks maybe two to three kilometers a day, and they take maybe what, three, 4,000 steps a day. A typical hunter-gatherer takes about 15 to 20,000 steps a day. Per kilo hunter-gatherers spend about twice as much energy per kilo on being physically active per day than our ape cousins. And importantly, that physical activity occurs as we age, right? So Americans are pretty inactive, as we all know. A typ...

 Digestive Enzymes Leaking into the Body May Increase Aging

In young rats, the researchers found low levels of the protein-breaking enzyme trypsin, although the tiny folds (villi) of the small intestine and the lungs contained more of this molecule. However, trypsin levels were much higher in old animals. “High densities are on sections of the intestine, liver, and lung, organs that are in the pathway of digestive enzymes leaking from the small intestine,” the paper says. Elevated levels of other digestive enzymes (elastase, lipase, and amylase) ...

 Pension-Fraud Correlated with Longevity

Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there’s the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records. For example, the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105-year-olds than all of the rich places in England put together. It’s closely followed by downtown Manchester, Liverpool and Hull. Yet these places have the lowest frequency of 90-year-olds and are rated by the UK as the worst places to be an ol...

 Skepticism on Blue Zones

I started getting interested in this topic when I debunked a couple of papers in Nature and Science about extreme ageing in the 2010s. In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don’t stack up. I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only abou...

 1.6 Grams of Protein a Day Per Kilogram of Weight

To answer the simplest question of whether taking in more protein during weight training led to larger increases in muscle size and strength, the researchers added all of the results together. [...] But those who did ramp up their protein gained an extra 10 percent or so in strength and about 25 percent in muscle mass compared to the control groups. The researchers also looked for the sweet spot for protein intake, which turned out to be about 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weig...

 Lower Mortality in Moderate Drinkers VS Abstainers Result...

RESULTS: Without adjustment, meta-analysis of all 87 included studies replicated the classic J-shaped curve, with low-volume drinkers (1.3-24.9 g ethanol per day) having reduced mortality risk (RR = 0.86, 95% CI [0.83, 0.90]). Occasional drinkers (<1.3 g per day) had similar mortality risk (RR = 0.84, 95% CI [0.79, 0.89]), and former drinkers had elevated risk (RR = 1.22, 95% CI [1.14, 1.31]). After adjustment for abstainer biases and quality-related study characteristics, no significant r...

 Adult Physical Activity Keeps Immune System Young

It is widely accepted that aging is accompanied by remodelling of the immune system including thymic atrophy and increased frequency of senescent T cells, leading to immune compromise. However, physical activity, which influences immunity but declines dramatically with age, is not considered in this literature. We assessed immune profiles in 125 adults (55–79 years) who had maintained a high level of physical activity (cycling) for much of their adult lives, 75 age-matched older adults and ...