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"Youth is wasted on the young"
George Bernard Shaw
Attaining the optimum life of a human being, which should be our duty, our role - not a side-show issue - is to achieve wisdom, grace, beauty and health. Often these only come to us with the years, not decline, as is sometimes perceived. You will know the saying "life begins at forty" and if you are beyond those years, you will have discovered this is true. In the main, we do not find ourselves or learn much about the process of living until we have had years of practice.
That's logical.
But the old way of looking at things was that, by then, it was too late; we had missed our chance.
Trash this belief at once! At forty you have barely lived half your life -often the painful half. The remainder is the reward or pay-off. It's the part which brings about the reckoning or balance, if you like.
Now that's a contrived way of introducing the key anti-ageing topic for this site, which is BALANCE.
As in so many endeavors, bliss, success or achievement only comes about from a harmonious balance of counterpoised forces. Buddha advocated the Middle Way; the Chinese introduced us to yin and yang; whereas we might talk of male and female virtues; nowadays we have the concept of right and left brain.
These are NOT competing elements. These are co-operative elements. Each plays its part. There is no good or bad side. It's the balance between the two which counts. We need both, like night and day, sweet and sour or fast and slow. Some combinations invent each other, like good and bad, high and low, or old and new; you need one to create the other (much advertising, for instance is to create the destructive unbalanced notion that "old" is bad, only "new" is good, but that's just to get you to part with your bucks).
Other combinations seem to exist in the nature of things. You can't have a left without a right, really; otherwise you would just walk around in circles. And that's a good way to think about this all-important issue. All left turns or an all right turn is an idiot’s way to get nowhere!
So it is that health and vitality, your main passports to a long and happy life, are built around many balances: balanced nutrients, balanced energies, balanced hormones and a balanced view of life.
We'll be looking at ways of achieving all these desirable states on this website and in my forthcoming book DO YOU WANT TO BE A CROCK OR A CLASSIC CAR? In the meantime, I suggest you make it your mot juste for the third age. Think it, speak it and act on it! You'll be calmer, happier, healthier, livelier and wiser.
That's a promise built into the fabric of life!
OXYGEN IS A POISON!
Despite its status as a necessary life substance for all except a few special organisms, oxygen is a highly toxic mutagenic gas (FREE RADICALS IN BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE, B Halliwell and J MC Gutteridge, OUP, Oxford 1999, p. 1). We can only survive its presence in our atmosphere because we have important anti-oxidant mechanisms to protect us from its damage.
Initially the earth's atmosphere had less than 1% oxygen. But activity by blue-green algae species billions of years ago gradually increased these levels. For them it was just a waste product of a respiration process that relied on releasing hydrogen from water. By 1.3 billion years ago, levels had risen to 1%. Around 500 million years ago, oxygen levels had reached 10%. This was sufficient to switch on the all-important ozone layer, which protects the earth's surface from blazing destructive UV radiation.
From then on, other life forms could evolve.
O2 may have reached 35% in the late Carboniferous age, when life was mainly plant-based. The present level of 21% was settled around 5 million years ago. As a result, oxygen is the most prevalent element in the Earth's crust (53%); rock is basically silicon dioxide, with additions
DEFINITION: Oxidation has long been taken to mean the addition of an oxygen atom to an existing chemical structure. More latterly, scientists have also used this term for an exchange in which an electron is removed from a grouping. The opposite process, hydrogenation, is the addition of hydrogen; addition of an electron to a grouping is thus also hydrogenation.
About 85- 90% of oxygen taken up in advanced animal respiration is consumed by the mitochondria. The essence of metabolic energy production in the body is that food materials are oxidized, by having electrons stripped. This releases the energy to create molecules of ATP (adenosine triphosphate), which is the body's chief energy transport mechanism. The whole process is done in a gradual step-wise fashion, involving the creation of excited forms of iron, from ferrous to ferric-haem cytochrome.
This is a very important physiological detail. It makes iron is one of the most destructive oxidative stress elements in our tissues. The removal of excess "hot" iron may be one of the principal mechanisms by which chelation with EDTA reduces or even reverses oxidative age damage.
The whole process is done under the control of a complex enzyme system called the cytochrome oxidase pathway. Cytochrome oxidase in mammals is special in that it works efficiently when there is almost no oxygen present. But xenobiotics and pollution very quickly poison this system, and so render us liable to tissue damage by oxidation.
REACTIVE OXYGEN SPECIES
The term "free radicals" (hence free-radical damage) was soon introduced into this debate. But strictly a free radical is simply one capable of existing independently (hence the term "free"); they don't necessarily bite! A better term is reactive oxygen species (ROS). The chief reactive oxydation ions are O2 and OH (hydroxyl ion). The so-called superoxide radical is not, in truth, as active or damaging as the basic oxygen radical, despite its name! The quartet is made up with the peroxide ion. This is also a killer ion and is generated briefly by certain white cells, to damage microbes before ingesting them. Out of place it is potentially harmful to us.
Finally, ozone is another reactive oxygen species which is highly destructive to living cells. However it is little found at sea level, remaining largely in the upper atmosphere, where it shields us from harmful UV radiation. Unfortunately, urban pollution, notably with traffic emissions, in the presence of sunlight, creates dangerous levels of ozone which we may breathe. It causes lung damage.
ANTI-OXIDANTS
Oxidation stress, leading to tissue damage, has now been implicated in a wide variety of disease complaints, including arthritis, heart disease, cancer, dementias and other degenerative illnesses. Environmental pollution and overburdened lifestyles unquestionably potentiate this ageing process. Smoking and excess alcohol increase oxidative damage also.
The most sensitive organ to oxidative damage is the brain. Hardly surprising, since around 25% of the body's metabolic activity occurs in this one organ. This means real changes and loss of cognitive function - "feeling old", lethargy, confusion and forgetfulness. There are many subtle layers and degrees of this unfortunate process which we recognize as a loss of zest for life and a failure to think as sharply as we once did.
As we have come to understand the power and significance of oxidative tissue damage, a key process in ageing, then substances which protect us from this occurrence have assumed steadily greater significance. We call these, not unnaturally, anti-oxidants. They can be listed as follows:
- · AMINO ACIDS
cysteine, glutathione, methionine, taurine.
- · BIOFLAVINOIDS
anthocyanins (blue-black fruits), citrus bioflavinoids (lemon, orange, grapefruit etc), oligometric proanthocyanidins (OPC) in pycnogenol.
- · CAROTENOIDS
alpha and beta carotene (red, yellow and orange fruits and vegetables), lycopene (red fruits and vegetables).
- · HERBS
Gingko, green tea, milk thistle, sage
- · MINERALS
Copper, zinc, manganese, selenium
- · VITAMINS AND CO-FACTORS
A, B2, C, Eand coenzyme Q10, NADH (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide).
- · ENZYMES
catalase, glutathione peroxidase, superoxide dismutase
- · HORMONE
Glutathione
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