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How the world got lost on
the road to an anti-aging pill
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August 18, 2021: by Bill Sardi
Life extension (longevity) is one thing. Health extension is another.
Society values both. What the public dreads is one without the other, living longer in misery. The 30-year rise in life expectancy in the last 120 years is one of humanity’s greatest achievements (healthy life expectancy at birth is now ~78.9 and 68.5 years, females/males). But prolonged lifespan hasn’t been accompanied by extended healthspan.
Longevity has been achieved in a costly way, by over-drugging and treating each and every chronic age-related disease separately by a bevy of medical specialists. Modern medicines do a reasonably good job of lowering numbers (cholesterol, PSA, blood sugar, blood pressure) but fails to address the main cause of chronic diseases – aging. Human lifespan has been expanded beyond healthspan, which means people suffer through the last decades of their lives in a chronic debilitated state.
Think of having a 1938 Packard touring car in the garage. It’s 83 years old. You drive it on Sundays when it’s sunny. But if you drove it every day, even in the rain, would might rust out and have to go to scrap metal. What if these old cars were self-repairing like the human body? One automobile manufacturer has actually produced such a vehicle.
Obviously, self-repair would be a bit more challenging in the human body. But progress has actually been made. Modern medicine now knows how to invigorate old cells to perform like young ones again by renewal of mitochondria, the energy-producing compartments in living cells. However, such knowledge has not become part of applied medicine.
There are a few hundred mitochondria in very living cell. Only about 4% of mitochondria are operable by age 80. However, mitochondrial batteries are self-recharging. They renew themselves in a process called fission/fusion. A self-recharging human body is achievable today, without costly tests or treatments.
“If we continue to attack chronic fatal and disabling diseases in the future as we have in the past, we might very well succeed in postponing death, but the price of this success will likely be a rise in the prevalence and severity of aging related conditions. The trade-offs may no longer be favorable as increasingly larger segments of the population survive deeper into the “red zone”—a period in the life span when frailty and disability rise exponentially.”
Dr. Olshansky states: “health extension should supplant life extension as the primary goal of medicine and public health.”
Given that chronic non-communicable disease is estimated to cause 72.3% of deaths, what researchers now realize it is more valuable to achieve health than it is longevity; that the compression of morbidity to the very end of the lifespan potentially has more value by addressing the cause of aging itself rather than treating but not curing each chronic age-related diseases as they occur.
What would that be worth in dollars should modern medicine adopt this new paradigm? About $367US trillion by adding 10-healthy years to life, $38US trillion by adding 1-year to life expectancy, which is larger than the US economy, says a landmark report in NATURE AGING.
Most of the gains in life expectancy have been made by elimination of causes of death at the beginning of life. The greater mountain to climb is to renew an old body, like that self-repairing old car. Theoretically, a person would never be too old to benefit from such technology.
It is now possible to distinguish chronological (calendar) aging from biological aging. For example, a recent analysis shows the longevity-risk-adjusted global age of a 55-year-old Swedish male is 48, whereas a 55-year-old Russian male is closer in age to 67. But will doctors begin to perform such assessments?
What has been kept under wraps is that this is already achievable, it is not some far-fetched or expensive technology that will require another decade to deliver.
Metformin, an economical antidiabetic drug, has been repurposed as a life-extending molecule. For metformin treatment that starts at age 75, life-extension rises by 2.9 years; at 20 years rises by 3.0 years; at 40 years rises by 3.0 years; at 60 years rises by 3.3 years; and at 80 years rises by 4.3 years. The modest additions to healthy life extension vary from 1.7 to 2.5 years. But far greater healthy life extension can be achieved than metformin, as you will learn below.
One of the greatest advances in human biology has been hidden from public awareness. Humans are not bound to a biological fate determined by their forefathers. Inherited gene mutations only represent 2% of disease. Genes are not static, they are dynamic.
Structurally, the sequence of steps (nucleotides) on the DNA ladder may be inherited and diseases like sickle cell anemia or cystic fibrosis may be passed on to future generations. But aging itself is not determined by DNA sequencing nor resolved by so-called CRISPR gene therapy where a new nucleotide is inserted into DNA.
Genes produce proteins in response to temperature, radiation, nourishment or the lack thereof (calorie restriction or starvation). This is called epigenetics, and it trumps genetics.
“Starvation” sends a survival signal controlled by the SIRTUIN1 gene to activate a protein called AMPK, which in turn renews mitochondria. The mitochondrial batteries can then be re-charged.
What this means is your father may have died prematurely at age 57 from a heart attack and your mother at age 62 from metabolic disease, but that may not be your same fate.
A recent report, that has been kept in obscurity, reveals that epigenetic aging can be reversed in humans!
Furthermore, metformin has been shown to produce significant reductions in age-related maladies:
Among high cancer risk males (75-year old), metformin reduced likelihoods of cardiovascular disease (-13.3%), cancer (-45.5%), depression (-5.0%), and frailty-related disease (-13.7%).
Among high-frailty males: metformin reduced likelihoods of cardiovascular disease(-18.8%), cancer (-3.9%), dementia (-3.8%), depression (-15.6%), and frailty-related disease (-23.8%).
Metformin produces these health benefits largely by activating a protein in the body called AMPK (5′ AMP-activated protein kinase).
AMPK is an energy-sensing protein. Metformin is a driver of AMPK.
Studies reveal the red wine molecule resveratrol is 50-200 times better than metformin at elevating AMPK! Metformin is a prescription drug; resveratrol is a non-prescription herbal remedy.
Metformin’s drawback is that it depletes vitamin B12 which is associated with brain shrinkage and declining mental performance.
While the Natural Medicine Comprehensive Database lists over 200 brands of resveratrol pills, only one commercially available red wine pill (Longevinex®) has been demonstrated to renew mitochondria.
The greater problem is how to provide financial incentives for doctors to prescribe such technologies. The profit-motive is not agreeable with this objective. Put into practice, mitochondrial renewal could be the end of doctoring as we know it. For this to become a factor in modern society, adults will need to opt for this alternative on their own, without medical guidance.
What is good for doctors has not necessarily been good for patients. The financial incentives in modern medicine reward treatment but not cures. As long as the masses remain ignorant, they will be pawns in the ongoing medical racketeering.
There is a glimmer of hope that advances like this may be allowed in exchange for freedom of choice. The globalist agenda is to cull the world of “useless eaters,” then offer such anti-aging technologies in a carrot-and-stick approach. However, adoption of a worldwide digital currency may only authorize purchases that fit the political agenda. Natural molecules like resveratrol may then be removed from store shelves and online offerings.
So far, only one brand of resveratrol pills has successfully undergone toxicity testing and would therefore pass the proposed FDA requirement.
There is a current effort to force all nutraceuticals like resveratrol to undergo toxicity testing even though dietary supplements are safer than aspirin, table salt and tap water. There have been no deaths reported to the Poison Control Centers of America for resveratrol pills in the past decade. Rules forbidding health claims are so absurd that dietary supplement manufacturers cannot even make a claim vitamin C prevents scurvy.
Despite the fact the biological action of prescription drugs can be duplicated by dietary supplements at far less cost and side effects, the FDA is renewing efforts to re-classify nutraceuticals as drugs.
The anti-dietary supplement propaganda campaign has already begun. Bloomberg News went so far as to condemn the temporary suspension of shipping an unproven vaccine while consumers could order elk antler velvet on Amazon, a traditional Chinese remedy that is without side effects.
The National Health Federation is leading an effort to let Congress know in no uncertain terms that dietary supplements are to remain available without undue costs for needless toxicity testing, given their safety has been proven over decades. The largest amount of mail sent to Congress occurred in 1994 in opposition to legislation that would have recategorized dietary supplements as drugs.
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