4 Under-Appreciated "Youth Factors" - Bio-Individual Wellness

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As the idea that we can influence our own aging process continues to gain currency in the health space and popular media, it becomes ever more important to keep the whole picture in view and not get sidetracked by the "shiny objects" that tend to grab the spotlight.

This is the seventh post in a series about slowing and reversing biological aging. The first six posts are:

This article resumes the journey down the list of "youth factors" in the list from the Combat Aging with 16+ “Youth Factors” article.

Thymus Gland and Immune Function

The next "youth factor" on the list was covered previously in Regenerating the Thymus Gland and Immune Function. Quoting from the introduction to that article:

"One of the biggest threats to the health and longevity of otherwise healthy people as they get older is infections like pneumonia. This is because as people age their immune function declines due in part to the shrinking or "involution" of the thymus gland throughout life. So a person could be doing everything right for their general health yet be taken out by something like pneumonia. This is quite common."

Read the full article to learn more on that topic.

Control of Cortisol and Optimization of Hormones and Neurotransmitters

You need the "stress hormone" cortisol to maintain normal blood sugar levels, regulate the immune system and inflammation, and generally keep you alive. Even when you are not under stress, you must have some cortisol. When you are responding to something your body perceives as stress, cortisol rises.

The term "stress" was coined by Hans Selye in 1936 and defined as "the non-specific response of the body to any demand for change". Stress can be due to psychological factors, toxic influences, infection, or inflammation.

Cortisol is a "catabolic" hormone, meaning that it promotes the breakdown of tissues. It does this to make stored resources available to respond to the demand of the situation.

But when cortisol is chronically elevated above normal levels, it becomes a problem, potentially leading to steady loss of lean body mass, accumulation of visceral fat, elevation of blood sugar, initiation of insulin resistance, and more.

And as people get older, their cortisol levels tend to rise. This is one of the reasons that older people have more difficulty than younger people with adding muscle mass when they exercise.

This is sometimes referred to as "anabolic resistance". Anabolic processes are the aspects of constructive metabolism that build things, also referred to as "growth" processes, whereas catabolic processes are deconstructive processes that break things down to convert them to energy or to recycle components for use in anabolic processes.

In studies of older people, lowering their cortisol and inflammation enabled them to gain muscle mass in response to exercise at a rate similar to people in their 20s.

Another cause of anabolic resistance is the fact that mTOR, the most well-known mediator of anabolic (growth) processes, is less easily activated in older people, as discussed in Should You Restrict Protein, Carbs, and Calories, or Eat More as You Get Older? AMPK, Autophagy, and mTOR.

Because cortisol responds to stress by marshalling and focusing resources to respond to a demand or challenge, it lowers the level of hormones (e.g. sex hormones) that allocate resources for other purposes that would be counterproductive to survival in response to a stressor.

Elevated cortisol is one of the main causes of sex hormone deficiencies or imbalances. So managing stress from all sources should be your first priority if you want to optimize your libido, sexual function, and youthfulness.

Elevated cortisol also lowers the secretion of growth hormone, and maintaining a youthful level of growth hormone secretion is definitely important for youthfulness and probably also for longevity.

Some researchers in the science of aging, such as David Sinclair, PhD, champion catabolic processes and believe that anabolic hormones like growth hormone and sex hormones promote aging and reduce lifespan. But I believe that the evidence that could be interpreted to support this idea is weak. There must be a balance between catabolic and anabolic influences. Otherwise, we wither away.

Next, no discussion of stress, cortisol, and other hormones can ignore neurotransmitters because neurotransmitters heavily influence your psychology and stress. If you have imbalanced neurotransmitters due to factors like nutritional deficiencies or dysfunction in methylation cycle, then addressing these underlying biochemical influences could be instrumental in managing your psychological stress, cortisol, and other hormones.

I evaluate all of these influences in my clients because I know that one of the main causes of dysfuction in the body is a chronically elevated stress response.

Voltage, Current, and Light

The "Healing Is Voltage" series of articles (see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) introduced some principles of the body's biophysics (voltage and current) that are sometimes the most important factors affecting a person's health and consequently their youthfulness and longevity. It's not all about biochemistry and genetics. And biophysics is unfortunately usually missing from most conversations about health and longevity.

In addition to voltage and current, light plays an even bigger role than most of us realize. You probably know that various wavelengths of sunlight stimulate the synthesis of vitamin D (UV wavelengths), promote the production of serotonin (predominantly blue light), and improve mitochondrial function and nitric oxide synthesis (infrared light). But our bodies also produce light as a means of communication and self-regulation.

In fact, one of the most exciting new technologies for promoting youthfulness and longevity is the photobiomodulation patch technology invented by David Schmidt and marketed by Lifewave. One of these patches (X39), stimulates stem cells in the skin to revert to a more pleuripotent type of stem cell that can repair more types of tissue than just skin tissue.

Other Lifewave patches increase the body's own production of antioxidants like glutathione and superoxide dismutase, reduce inflammation, improve mitochondrial function, reduce pain, elevate the pituitary peptide epithalamin, and more.

All of this is accomplished without putting anything into the body by simply reflecting the body's own light back to it in certain ways. Light is a medicine and youth elixir of the future.

Mitochondrial Optimization, Metabolism, and Metabolic Rate

Mitochondria, the bacteria-like structures in our cells commonly referred to as the "power houses" of the cell, are involved in much more than energy production. They manufacture hormones, degrade toxins, monitor the environment, manage our stress response, control cancer, and more.

Science is increasingly discovering that mitochondrial function is at the core of health, disease, aging, and longevity. And this makes sense even if we only look at the energy production fuction of mitochondria. Your body runs on energy, right? How are you going to run metabolic processes and maintain and repair your body without adequate energy?

Yet the "rate of living theory of aging" has had many aging researchers and theorists believing that the way to extend life is to slow it down by using less energy per unit of time so as to reduce the oxidative damage done by cellular metabolism. This idea is related to the "free radical theory of aging".

But it turns out that oxidative damage resulting from cellular metabolism is not always proportional to the rate of metabolism. In other words, slowing down metabolism does not necessarily reduce oxidative damage, and speeding up metabolism doe snot necessarily increase oxidative damage.

Minimal oxidative damage occurs when cellular metabolism is operating most efficiently, and efficiency can be lost at either high or low rates of metabolism.

What do I mean by "efficient" metabolism? An efficient metabolism is one in which energy is produced without waste, especially waste in the form of reactive species of oxygen (ROS). One way that ROS get formed is when electrons cannot get all of the way down the electron transport chain through Complex IV to the electron's final destination, which is union with the final electron acceptor (oxygen), so that ATP can be formed simulaneously when a hydrogen proton passes from the intermembrane space through Complex V and joints oxygen and its new extra electron to form water ("metabolic water").

Whenever electrons cannot get all of the way down the ETC, they back up, "leak" out of the ETC, and combine with oxygen in an uncontrolled manner, producing the ROS called superoxide, which is molecular oxygen with an extra electron.

Mitochondria sometimes intentionally produce ROS for various purposes, but in general, we want maximum energy production with minum ROS formation. Anything that interferes with the free flow of electrons down the electron transport chain (ETC) to oxygen reduces the efficiency of energy metabolism, producing less ATP and metabolic water and producing more ROS.

Many factors, such as heavy metals, bacterial endotoxin (e.g. LPS), oxidized polyunsaturated fatty acids, excess nitric oxide, and more, can impair the function of the electron transport chain (ETC), causing electrons to leak out of the ETC and form ROS.

Surprisingly, another factor that can increase ROS formation is a slow metabolism. If thyroid signaling is lower, then the utilization of ATP is lower. When ATP utilization is lower, there is less ADP to be turned back into ATP. So the ETC can't move electrons and protons as quickly to their final destination (oxygen) to produce more ATP and metabolic water.

Again, if the electrons can't move down the ETC faster than they are being supplied from food via the Kreb's Cycle, electrons leak out of the ETC and form superoxide.

So contrary to the "rate of living theory of aging" idea that a slow metabolism necessarily results in lower ROS formation and therefore lower oxidative damage, the opposite can be true. A slower "rate of living" (a slower metabolic rate) can produce more ROS and oxidative damage.

The key is to maintain a high metabolic rate that is well-matched to the amount of elecrons and protons coming into the ETC from food. Overeating with a low level of physical activity is probably the worst combination because it pushes more electrons into the ETC than can be processed into ATP due to low ATP utilization, resulting from low physical activity.

But another problematic combination would be overly-restricting calories. With over restriction of calories, thyroid signaling and metabolic rate could fall enough that even a very low intake of food would push more electrons through the ETC than it can process into ATP because not enough ATP is being used by the slow metabolism that was induced by restricting calories too much.

Maintaining a balance of electrons in and electrons out of the ETC is much more feasible with a high metabolic rate than a low metabolic rate because you cannot keep lowering caloric intake to stay below the rate of ATP utilization. Eventually, you would not be eating enough to survive. It would be far better to focus on increasing the rate of ATP utilization than to focus on decreasing the supply of food energy.

Aside from that, only a high throughput of calories (food) can deliver a sufficent quantity of micronutrients for health. Caloric restriction by necessity requires a great deal of nutritional supplementation, as demonstrated by Bryan Johnson's longevity "Blueprint" self experiment in which he must take over 100 supplements daily due in part to the fact that he is using a vegan diet and in part to the fact that he is restricting his calories by 25%. He must also use exogenous testosterone because caloric restriction caused his testosterone to plummet.

There appears to be a better way, and Joe Cohen of SelfDecode is showing that his very different approach (a meat-based diet with, no caloric restriction, and less intensive intermittent fasting) can outperform Bryan Johnson's approach, at least in his own body. Joe Cohen's PACE of Aging score from TruDiagnostic is 6.3 while Bryan's is 6.9 (the lower the score, the lower the pace of aging, the better).

The Bio-Individuality Bottom Line

Bio-Individuality also plays into this. Research on mice showed that while caloric restriction did extend lifespan in certain strains of mice, it lowered lifespan in other strains. And these difference were linked to genetic differences in genes related to detoxification and energy production.

The bottom line is that we need to keep the full picture in view as we navigate the opportunity to extend lifespan and healthspan. If you might be interested in crafting a bio-individual approach to optimizing your health and longevity, check out the Bio-Individual Blueprint Roadmap.