Handbook of Immortality

By Stuart Wilson

The Handbook of Immortality is a practical guide to successful aging. In the handbook, the different theories of what causes aging and aging-related diseases such as Alzheimer's Disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease (heart attack), stroke and diabetes are explained. Scientists have been working hard to understand how the effects of aging and the risks of developing these aging-related diseases can be reduced. In 2011 there were more than 14,000 scientific studies on aging and related diseases which included the effects of carnosine, green tea, aspirin, melatonin, resveratrol, garlic and many more vitamins and substances. In the handbook, the scientific evidence of the possible benefits (or not) of these substances are explained in easy to digest, everyday language with a dash of humour.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stuart Wilson
• Release date: Apr 7, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476089218

Stuart Wilson

Stuart Wilson has worked in publishing, advertising and counselling, and he now runs a names consultancy. He lives in Devon. He is the author of Simply the Best Baby Name Book and The Pan Guide to Babies' Names.

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The Handbook of Immortality

by Dr Stuart Mark Wilson

Smashwords edition

Copyright 2012 Stuart Wilson

With gratitude to Kenneth Wilson for help with typing and editing

Discover other titles at http://www.drstuartwilson.com

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Foreword

There is no single elixir of life. However scientists have been working hard to understand aging and aging-related diseases. In 2011 there were more than 14,000 scientific studies conducted on aging. In The Handbook of Immortality I describe in everyday language what these scientists have found and how we can use that knowledge today in a practical way to help us all live long and healthy lives.

First though, a word about risk. Many thousands, if not millions, of people take the substances mentioned in this Handbook without any ill effect. But adverse effects such as allergic reactions can occur to many different substances, for example allergy to peanuts. Also, if you have an existing medical condition or are about to undergo a medical procedure, take medical advice before you take any of the substances! Finally, if you do have an unfortunate reaction to any of the substances mentioned in this Handbook, don’t come litigating at my door! I have warned you about the risk! In any case, I am poor so you won’t get very much.

CONTENTS

An introduction to aging

Car crashes on the road to immortality

Weighing up the weight of scientific evidence

A personal note about animal testing

Diet and aging

Anyone for tea. As long as it is green tea?

Melatonin for a good night’s sleep

Carnosine in our muscles

Garlic for halitosis

Aspirin, not just for a headache

Red wine and the French Paradox

Turmeric and curcumin, the golden spice

Quercetin stoking the furnaces

Lycopene in blood red tomatoes.

Ubiquitous coenzyme Q10

Ginkgo biloba; a living fossil

Selenium from the soil

Astragalus at the root of aging

Vitamins for vitality

Fibre for regularity

Final comments

Science bites

The immortal cells of Henrieta Lacks

Cholesterol, good cop/bad cop

Mad Cow Disease, a member of the aggregation family

Testing a mouse’s memory with the Morris Water Maze

Helicobacter pylori screws with the stomach

Breaking hearts

The Placebo Effect

Apoptosis, doing the honourable thing

Darwin versus Lamarck. round two

Sugar overload

An introduction to aging

The record-breaking Wrinklies

The oldest known living inhabitant of our planet, Methuselah, lives on a wind-swept mountainside in the White Mountains of California. Methuselah is a gnarled Bristlecone pine that tree-ring studies have shown to be nearly 5000 years old. That is an impressive age, even for a tree and it is fifty times longer than many of us could expect to live. In our defence, trees are fairly simple life-forms when compared to the complexity of animals and humans. Trees don’t have livers, kidneys, brains or a host of other complex organs that mammalian animals need for life. Methuselah has even lost a few limbs to the ravages of wind and time but I doubt if our planet’s oldest inhabitant has even noticed.

Compared to Methuselah, mammals are much more complex and have much more fleeting lives. The oldest recorded mammal is that of a bowhead whale that was caught off the coast of Alaska in 2007. Embedded in the whale’s neck was a harpoon tip of the type that had not been used in the region for over 130 years and has, in fact, been traced back to its manufacture in 1880. Scientists now believe that bowhead whales can live to be 200 years old. How does this compare to humans?

The record for the oldest human is Jeanne Calment of France, 1875-1997 at 122 years old. Though impressive, it is interesting to note that this record age is not much older than many of us might expect to live today. In fact, this record age is still only 50 years more than the mean life expectancy in the US and Europe. There is no doubt that we are living longer but this does not appear to be increasing the maximum lifespan that our species can achieve. If the maximum age that we could expect to live was in fact increasing year on year, then the record of Jeanne Calment, which has remained unbroken now for more than 15 years, would surely have already been broken and broken several times over. What explains this absolute age that we cannot live beyond? Why does our maximum lifespan appear to be capped?

We die because our selfish genes don't care.

In life, we may invest time and energy in our careers and hobbies but however fulfilling these are, it is not why we are here. Leaving aside the existence, or not, of a God or Gods or at least a sentient purpose to our existence, we exist in order to propagate. It is where we came from and it is where we are going or for those of us who are older, where we most likely have already been. We age because, in pure evolutionary terms, there has never been any selection pressure for our genes (the genetic information present in every one of our cells that makes us and our bodies who and what we are) to allow us to live beyond our reproductive years and the reproductive years of our children. Once we have fulfilled our roles as parents and grandparents which ensures that our genes have been passed safely on through our children and grandchildren there is no reason for our genes to keep us around. Our bodies slowly degenerate because they are not designed to do otherwise.

So we die through the casual neglect of our own selfish genes. Can anything be done about it? Many scientists now believe that we can tackle the age-related deterioration of our bodies but not by some magical elixir of life but by a basic scientific understanding of what has and what is going wrong and by correcting this with science and technology, some of which is already available to us. So what is going on? What is aging?

What is aging?

In order to be able to tackle aging, we must first know what aging is. As the years pass and we head for that age which most of us would call ‘old age’ a whole raft of changes occur so that our older bodies are vastly different from our youthful selves. So profound are these changes, that virtually no aspect of our bodies remain unaffected.

As we age, we lose muscle strength, our hair thins (in men and women), our brains shrink, our thyroids shrink, our bodies are less able to repair (cuts take longer to heal) and our body begins to attack itself (arthritis, for example), our skin becomes thinner and, along with our hearts, less elastic, our bones become brittle, we sleep badly, we develop cataracts, high blood pressure and have an increased risk of diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s Disease, diabetes, pneumonia, tuberculosis etc..

What is the root cause of all these changes? Is there even one single cause of aging? Perhaps not! Scientists have discovered that there may not be just one mechanism of aging and that there may be several problems that build up with time. Below, I discuss the main scientific theories of aging which reflect the fundamental processes of life: body growth, turnover and repair.

Theory of Aging One – the skipping rope effect

The cells which are the building blocks of our bodies and contain our genetic material need to constantly divide and multiply as part of the normal processes in the body but also to replace damaged and worn out tissues. For example, our skin is constantly being shed and renewed and when we cut ourselves the skin cells need to divide to repair the damage.

When we are young and vigorous, so are our youthful cells. The problem occurs as we get older. From the moment that we begin life as a fertilised egg, it appears that our cells are only able to divide a set number of times, a fact discovered by Leonard Hayflick in 1961. The number of times that a cell can divide is called the Hayflick Limit and it is surprisingly low. It appears that our cells can only divide tens of times, not hundreds or thousands as might be expected. Even this low number of divisions is enough to grow us to our youthful adult selves but as we get older, our cells run out of steam and can no longer divide. If our cells are no longer able to divide in order to replace the normal turnover of skin for example, or to repair damage, then our organs can struggle to do their job, our ability to fight off infection can be lessened and our skin can thin.

What causes this limit to the number of times that our cells can divide? Our genetic information or genes are contained in packages called chromosomes. These divide along with our cells to ensure that each new cell has all