How To Live Longer

Everybody wants to know how to live longer, right?  I mean, you don’t hear a whole lot about advice about how to shorten the typical life span.

Anti-aging is a big, BIG topic, however, so I’m going to break this up into three sections:  toxins, hormones, and the immune system.  There’s some overlap between the groups, but we’ll stick with that for simplicity’s sake.  Today’s post will be on toxins and free radicals, and we’ll cover the other two in successive posts.

How To Live Longer: Toxins

First off, quit smoking.  Yes, yes, yes, I know that’s cliche’ advice a thousand times over, but there’s a reason why it’s cliche’… because the evidence for it is so overwhelming.  Even a little bit of smoking is bad for you, as I discussed in this article on the smoking dangers of even a light habit.

That article was just on the obvious downsides of smoking… lung cancer and emphysema.  But, there’s oh so much more that smoking will do.  As an example, as soon as you take a drag on a cigarette, you paralyze the cilia, or little itty bitty hairs that line your respiratory passages… you know, the tubes that carry AIR to your body.

Why are those little hairs important? Well, because they sort of wave around and push mucus up and out of the body to clear out all the gunk that gets trapped in it.  Okay, I know that’s a little gross to think about, but you know what’s even more gross to think about?  Tarry, filthy thick sludge that’s stuck in your lungs and respiratory tract because it ISN’T being cleared out on a regular basis.

This is an important part of the immune system, and even a little cigarette smoke paralyzes it and brings it to a standstill (I told you there would be some overlap between today’s catagories).  But wait!  There’s more!

Smoking is the poster boy of toxins because it’s a dramatic example of one of the main mechanisms by which toxins age you… free radicals.  I’ve written in more detail about free radicals in this post on how antioxidants work, and also in my free guide to nutritional supplements, but let me give you the quick version.

Free radicals are highly reactive molecules that damage anything they touch.  You can think of them almost like little bits of acid floating around, ruining whatever they come into contact with.  A commonplace example of the effect of free radicals is the rusting of metal.

They occur naturally in the enviroment and in the body (due to regular metabolic processes like energy production), but contact with various toxins and pollutants REALLY ramps up your exposure to these little devils.

Obviously, increased exposure to those toxins will increase how many free radicals you get bombarded with… or how much acid gets sprayed on you, if you like that metaphor. And these free radicals, once they get inside of you, tear down and break down your cells and tissues and organs bit by bit, until they slowly become less effective and eventually don’t work at all.

Sound like aging to you?  It should, because the action of free radicals is considered one of the main causes of aging.  Not only do free radicals directly break down the substance of your body, they mess with your genes as well.  That’s right, free radicals will eventually attack and break down portions of your very genetic code, altering the function of those genes.

Ever hear of cancer?  There’s a pretty good example of what can happen once DNA goes awry.  But that’s just a major, obvious end-result that we’ve managed to directly link to genetic damage… how many other minor, less noticeable diseases or ill effects are being caused throughout the body by genetic damage caused by exposure to toxins and free radicals?  Odds are, we’ll never sort all that out.

Avoid Toxins For Life Extension

What can you do about these free radicals so you can live longer?  Well, step one is avoidance, obviously, which is why I started this section off with “quit smoking”.  You’ve already got enough free radical nonsense to deal with from all of the industrial pollutants and toxins choking the environment; no need to go making things worse by VOLUNTEERING to pollute yourself further.

That’s just plain silly.

Oh, and of course, there’s plenty of other ways to pollute yourself besides smoking, so here’s some common sources of toxins to avoid:

• Other drug use, particularly recreational (that means you too, alcohol).
• Pesticides and herbicides in the food supply (which is why I buy organic).  There’s more to this than just toxins and free radicals.  Some of these chemicals can mess with your endocrine system (hormones), which I will discuss in more detail in tomorrow’s post on living longer.
• Chemicals in the water supply (I always get the filtered stuff). This is actually a pretty big topic all by itself that I’ll be covering in another post.
• Perfumes, dyes, non-stick or non-stain sprays, coatings, and treatments.  I’m going to lump other industrial toxins and chemicals in here, particularly if you are exposed to them at work.
• The air:  this is a tough one to deal with, because it’s not like you can walk around with a gas mask on.  Well, I guess you could, but it would REALLY adversely effect your love life.  One decent solution is to use air filters in the home, which is an environment that you can somewhat control.  Something is better than nothing.

Living Longer With Antioxidants

Next, you can actually protect yourself from free radical damage, also called “oxidation”, by supplementing with…. “anti- oxidants”.  Do you see now why antioxidants are so popular?  They shield you from all that nasty damage caused by stupid free radicals so that you get to live longer.

The mechanism of how they do this is fairly simple… they neutralize free radicals by donating an electron.  Free radicals are so reactive and damaging because they’re missing an electron.  So, hand over a spare electron, and poof!  That free radical calms down and doesn’t hurt anybody.

Since antioxidants have plenty of electrons to spare, they’re great at making free radicals shut up and go away before they poke a hole in anything important.  You can see this with your own eyes with the following experiment:

Slice an apple in two and set the halves on a plate.  Soon enough, the flesh of the apple will turn brown- that’s oxidation and free radicals at work.  Now do the same thing, but coat the sliced apple flesh with lemon juice.  It won’t turn brown (or it will take a really long time).  That’s because lemon juice is chock full of Vitamin C, a basic antioxidant, which then protects the exposed apple from browning due to oxidative damage.

The “basic” antioxidants are Vitamins C, E, A, and selenium… you’ll find those in most multivitamins.  But I suggest you take some additional, more potent antioxidants because of all the pollutants floating around out there that you just can’t realisitically avoid.

One term for these heavy-duty antioxidants is “polyphenols”.  That term just refers to the molecular structure having many (“poly”) phenol groups.  That particular structure means polyphenols have a lot more electrons to donate, which means that’s just that many more nasty free radicals that can be neutralized.

Things that include polyphenols that you might have heard of include dark chocolate, green tea, and red wine.   The two big heavy-hitter antioxidant supplements I like (because there’s so many excellent studies supporting them) are called resveratrol and pycnogenol.  Resveratrol is a red wine extract, and pycnogenol is a pine bark extract that I’ve written about it in articles like this one on inflammation and antioxidants and this one on natural tinnitus relief.

Another solid antioxidant worth mentioning is Co-Q10, because it does its work in the mitochondria, which are like the power generators of each individual cell.  You can read more about Co-Q10 in this article on CoQ10, the little known antioxidant.

It’s a good idea to take a blend of various antioxidants, since each different type is good at operating in different parts of the body.  So a broad mix is better than super-dosing with just one kind.

Okie-dokie, that’s about it for our discussion of toxins, free radicals, antioxidants, and how to live longer by understanding this particular component of aging.  Next time, we’ll talk about hormones.

Stay healthy!