YOU: The Most Important Choices For Making Yourself Younger:
#11 The Benefits of “Resveratrol”
Co-Author of 4 #1 NY Times Bestsellers including: YOU Staying Young. The Owner’s Manual For Extending Your Warranty (Free Press) and YOU: BEING Beautiful.
The Owner’s Manual to Outer and Inner Beauty
Our basic premise is that your body is amazing: You get a do over: it doesn’t take that long, and isn’t that hard if you know what to do. In these notes we give you a short course in what to do so it becomes easy for you and then to teach others. We want you to know how much control you have over your quality and length of life
Since this series started we’ve given you 10 easy to understand tips to Staying Young:
1. Understand you get a do over and it’s not that hard and it doesn’t take that long if you know what to do.
2. Start with walking.
3. Recruit a buddy and call daily.
4. Learn how to make YOU-turns
5-10. Pop these Pills:
5. one half a multivitamin morning and night;
6. vitamin D 500 IU, 7. Calcium 600mg, and 8. magnesium 200mg, morning and
night;
9. DHA –omega-3 600mg a day;
10. 162.5 mg of aspirin.
Today, we want to bend your mind about staying young by learning about something that has to do with why red wine or a pill that concentrates it’s good stuff may be what you’ll take yourself as well as give to your patients.
Animals live 1/3 longer with better health (to the equivalent of a human 150-160 years) if they are forced to eat between 15 and 35% less calories than normal. Why? This protective mechanism against famine ensures the survival of the individual through difficult times. And the damage too many calories does is often seen in causing damage to the second set of DNA you have in all cells, the DNA in your cell area called your mitochondria. And when you damage that mitochondrial DNA, you produce less energy from the same amount of nutrients. What does this have to do with red wine? The resveratrol in red wine (it gives it some of its red color) protects your mitochondria the same way calorie restriction does by turning on a chemical named sirtuin. Your mitochondria are your energy factories—so if you want to regain the energy of a 2 year old, or even a 20 year old, you want to keep your mitochondria young (we hate to say see below, but today that is necessary—see below for more on mitochondria and energy).
Sirtuins seem to have two ways of working to benefit you. One way sirtuin works is by influencing the way your DNA is formed when you make new DNA. DNA is encased in proteins called histones that stabilize the structure of the DNA. But when the sirtuin glue is activated (through the starvation stimulus or a lot or red wine, or a sirtuin drug), the resulting protein compresses the DNA on the histones —and thus reduces errors during the process. See your mitochondria have strands –or threads of DNA--if these threads are wound tightly around a spool, the thread is much harder to damage. So that is one thing sirtuins do. We worry about mitochondrial DNA because your mitochondria are the energy producing plants of your cells. Damaged mitochondria means less energy for you to keep up with your kids, or grandkids—mitochondrial damage seems to accumulate over a lifetime.
Think about it. If your body can’t produce energy efficiently, it means that mitochondria stop getting the most energy out of the oxygen and sugar that their furnaces are fed. So even if you have good nutrition in what you eat, lower levels of ATP are made. These inefficiencies mean that the sometimes the machinery “heats up” and free radicals are released—to cause that damaging oxidation. If you cut an apple and leave it out, the apple turns brown—that is oxidation. You can protect that with antioxidants, or just not cutting the apple till it’s about to be eaten. Same thing for mitochondrial DNA—we can generate more of our own antioxidants (antioxidants in food apparently are much, much less effective at protecting your DNA than the antioxidants you produce yourself). Or you can keep your DNA coiled on the spool till you need it—that’s what sirtuins do. Sirtuins are being studied –and they seem to slow everything that causes your mitochondria to age, at least in animal models, and now in humans with diabetes (type II diabetics age 1.5 years for every year they live with diabetes with average control, so slowing aging of diabetics is a useful model for not just diabetics but all of us).
So sirtuin’s normal or first role is to help gag all the genes that a cell needs to keep suppressed. It does so by keeping the chromatin, the stuff that wraps around the DNA, packed so tightly that the cell cannot get access to the underlying genes.
But sirtuin has another or second critical role, one that is triggered by emergencies like a break in both DNA strands of a chromosome. Double stranded breaks cause cell death (meaning: a lot of lack of energy) or cancers. After a double strand break, sirtuin rushes to the site to help knit the two parts of the chromosome back together. But in this salvage operation, it leaves its post, and the genes it was repressing (keeping tight on the spool) are liable to come back into action—unravel from the spool, if you will, causing mayhem. Thus providing extra sirtuin activators, in forms of pills, may help protect your energy factory creating chromosomes, letting you live with the energy of youth for many, many, more years. So what are we to do now, ‘til those pills are tested and made available to us?
1. Try Knotweed Apple pie.. . Knotweed (a Japanese plant) has 40 times more resveratrol per pound than grapes do—and it grows everywhere (and helps combine with apples to make a great apple-knotweed pie—skip the crust).
2. Try a muscadine desert chaser for the desert course. Or just the pie. Muscadine grapes from the Southwest U.S. also have a ton of resveratrol (several times more than most red wines). By the way, for the average red wine, you need 180 bottles a night (don’t try that by yourself) to protect your mitochondria.
3. Try to reduce your calories by 15 percent. We know this is hard. We have no secrets here.
4. Do the other choices we’ve written about and will write about till we know if a sirtuin pill is in your future.
Mehmet and I released a new book on November 11th, 2008, entitled YOU: Being Beautiful: The Owner’s Manual to Outer and Inner Beauty. We think it’s a great holiday or post holiday gift for your significant others. Beauty doesn’t as much reflect our vanity as much as it does our humanity and our health. So stay tuned for more tips on Staying Young, and on being more beautiful.
About the author: Michael F. Roizen, M.D., is a professor of anesthesiology and internal medicine, Chief Wellness Officer, and and chair of the Wellness Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. Dr Roizen can be heard on over 30 radio stations Saturdays from 5 to 7 pm. For a listing just email a request to YouDocs@gmail.com
NOTE: You should NOT take this as medical advice. This article is of the opinion of its author.
Please consult with your doctor before taking any supplements.
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