Healthy Aging

How Long Could We Live?

The science of anti-aging is not new.

For centuries, if not eons, people have sought out methods and techniques to help extend their lifespan.

Many of the original explorers who set out across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were on quests to discover “the Fountain of Youth.”

And much of mythology and ancient history documents how people have sought to live longer, or forever.

Why do we care so much?

Well, I’d argue that part of the reason the pursuit of anti-aging is so common is that we were built to live a long time.

Our telomeres (areas at the end of our chromosomes) are linked to early death and chronic disease. As they shorten, so too does our lifespan.

Research into the structure of our telomeres seems to point out that if we could optimize our telomeres we could live far, far longer than our current maximum age of 120.

People didn’t know this 100 years ago, but as we’ve begun to understand more about how our genes work, we now know that if we can exhibit therapeutic effects on telomeres there may be a chance that we keep on trucking for decades longer than we would have otherwise.

There are also other ways to help extend life.

These include optimizing nutrition, optimizing hormones, working on the human- cannabinoid system, and more.

We take anti-aging very seriously here, but, not just so we can live longer.

Instead, we want to make sure if we help to extend someone’s life, we also increase the quality of their life at the same time.

We could easily help people live on and on with the aid of machines, but no one wants to live that way.

In today’s article, I’m going to cover what in 2022 is the “tip of the spear” when it comes to increased lifespan and enhancing the quality of that elongated life.

4 Things We’re Focusing On in 2022 For Longer (and Better) Life

As I opened up in this article, one of the best ways to work on anti-aging is to focus on optimizing telomere length.

We believe that the longest a person can live is right around 120 years (just like the Bible says), but there are reports some people have lived as long as 122 years.

Will we be able to live past 120, to 130 or longer?

I’m not sure, but I believe that we can certainly make inroads towards a future where people are living to the age of 120 far more frequently.

Here are a few areas of focus that could help us get there.

1 – Increasing Antioxidant Intake (the Right Kind):

Free radicals are something I’ve talked about frequently in my blog.

Typically I relate the presence of free radicals to the likelihood of developing chronic issues like cancer, and more.

But as biology would have it, free radicals also present a clear and present danger to the length of our lives as their presence can degrade the quality of our genetic expressions and interfere with telomere length.

This is why we think one of the best ways to enhance your quality of life while also living longer is to take supplements (or eat foods) that contain antioxidants known to ward off free radicals.

One of the ones that I’ve focused on in numerous articles is resveratrol, with trans-resveratrol being the preferred form.

The Oxford Press writes the following about resveratrol:

…Which activates SIRT1, an intracellular regulatory protein that regulates important metabolic and physiological processes (40). It is commonly found in the skin of red grapes and has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties as well as a positive effect on general health in mammals. Resveratrol delays senescence at the cellular level, increases telomere length and telomerase activity in rodents but does not extend life span in healthy rodents or in a rodent model of premature aging… In humans, resveratrol has been reported to decrease oxidative stress and attenuate inflammation, reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases and diabetes. These are all aging-related pathologies so it has yet to be established whether resveratrol can slow the aging process by lowering the incidence of chronic diseases in humans.”

Other anti-aging antioxidants include the following:

  • Curcumin (from turmeric)
  • Vitamin C
  • CoQ10
  • Vitamin E
  • Rhodiola
  • Theanine
  • Nicotinamide riboside and nicotinamide mononucleotide
  • EGCG

Many, if not all of these, can be derived from your diet, and the few that aren’t are easily available in supplement form.

Perhaps most important is that many of these antioxidants address inflammation and help support a healthy response to inflammation.

Meaning, that with them circulating through your body, you’re bound to feel noticeably better as you watch your lifespan stretch out a little bit more.

2 – IV Nutrient Therapy:

This part of the anti-aging puzzle takes what I spoke about above, and puts it on steroids.

Ok, that’s just an expression, there are no steroids involved with IV Nutrient Therapy.

Instead, IV Nutrient therapy helps to deliver focused amounts well beyond the daily value into your bloodstream for an all-over and immersive infusion of antioxidants.

IV therapies for nutrient intake aren’t novel, as there is a decades-long history of people being placed on IVs for many reasons.

However, in this day and age, people who wish to take control of their health can now select a “cocktail” of nutrients designed to support cellular health and extend lifespan.

Consider many of the antioxidants I mentioned above.

Instead of trying to take supplements or get them in your diet via food, you can get an IV of those antioxidants and mainline them into your body for maximum effect.

Everyone’s needs are different, so that’s why clinics like ours can create “designer cocktails” (that sounds so bad) that are custom-tailored to give you the exact nutrients you need to help address your anti-aging concerns.

In addition to augmenting how your body ages, there are direct benefits that you may begin to feel immediately.

​IV vitamin drip therapy improves overall wellness by providing almost 100% of the vitamins and nutrients your body needs to:

  • Improve immune system response
  • Increase energy levels
  • Better management of symptoms of depression
  • Improve anxiety
  • Improve mental clarity and cognitive function
  • Reduce frequency and severity of migraines
  • Accelerate wound healing

…and more!

3 – CBD

CBD and its cousin THC are groundbreaking therapeutics for a wide range of conditions.

Sadly, the CBD/THC industries are rife with scams as well as confusion (and tricky rules and regulations).

But I would expect over the coming decade as the science begins to sort itself out and as the hype around CBD dies down it will become evident that CBD is a great anti-aging tool.

There are just two primary ways I believe CBD can help to improve your quality of life and help support extended age.

One of the first is better sleep.

There is research that suggests CBD can help to balance cortisol levels. Since elevated cortisol is known to both disrupt sleep as well as reduce the quality of deep sleep, this effect is certainly desirable as the better you sleep the more efficiently and effectively your body can heal.

Secondly,  CBD has been shown to modulate our stress response.

Again, relating to how we adapt to elevated cortisol levels if you use CBD you may be able to dial cortisol levels down so they don’t cause ancillary hormonal imbalances that interfere with genetic expression.

Newsweek.com writes: “Studies have shown that CBD promotes neural regeneration, specifically in the hippocampus part of the brain. And through its positive effects on the endocannabinoid system, CBD tries to balance the production of cortisol, a steroid hormone that produces stress. When cortisol production is modulated, it leads to improvement of a person’s behavior, mood, and keeps stress at bay.”

 4- Senotherapeutics

I’d be surprised if you’d heard of these kinds of interventions before.

Senotherapeutics are drugs, or other therapies, that kill senescent cells. The reason we want to do this is that senescent cells are cells that stop responding to normal “cell death” signals that then start acting erratically and then cause surrounding healthy cells to deviate from their normal function and go haywire, too.

We don’t want senescent cells proliferating in our bodies, and so the future of these kinds of interventions would look to clamp down on senescent cells’ propensity to wreak havoc at the cellular level.

There are 3 kinds of senotherapeutics currently being tested:

Senolytics – Drugs & Compounds which selectively kill senescent cells.
Senomorphics – Compounds to Reduce the toxins secreted by senescent cells.
Immune Surveillance – Using the immune system to target senescent cells.

I foresee a future where we can use 1, 2, or even all 3 therapies to help manage aging.

The good news now is that certain supplements (like Quercetin and Fisetin) are showing promise as being senolytic or senomporphic in nature, which means we do have natural options available to us now to start testing.

Will We Live Longer?

The answer is, yes.

Will all humans live past 120?

I can’t say for certain.

I know that with the help of AI and nanotechnology, we certainly could… but that brings us to a moral and ethical quandary that will dominate the headlines in years to come.

For now, I know we can implement some of these basic therapies and many people can go another few years and feel great doing it.

And that’s the best I can hope for in this day and age. 

 

 

Talk soon,