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Washington (UPI) Jul 18, 2005 As the Rolling Stones testified, "what a drag it is getting old" - and that was decades before Mick Jagger and Keith Richards actually began looking like aging rock stars, but at least today's population has access to the best science-based advice on how to live well longer. The pity is, so many seek exotic fountains of youth while ignoring the simple things. So says Bruce Ames, a biochemist and world leader in aging and nutrition research. "There's no sense trying to make people live longer if they're shortening their lifespan by smoking or eating lousy diets, and we're talking about a sizable percent of the country," Ames told United Press International. In 1998, Ames won the prestigious National Medal of Science, and in 2001 he was awarded Oregon State University's first $50,000 Linus Pauling Institute Prize for Health Research. He is a senior scientist at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute in California and scientific advisory board member of Juvenon.com, which markets an anti-aging supplement he developed. He also is 77 and going strong. Ames combines plain-spoken reminders to eat right and stay fit with esoteric insights into the nature of the aging process. In this article, Ames talks about the basics of aging and how to keep from aiding and abetting it. Life expectancy increased about 30 years from 1900 to 2000, and I think it's going to increase at least another 30 years from 2000 to 2100. Science is going like a rocket. In the old days you knew the dozen people in the world who worked on aging. Now there so many bright young people coming into the field. So I'm an optimist. We don't know where all the breakthroughs are going to come from, but we know there will be ways to intervene. My interest is mainly diet. It's clear that there are all sorts of ways of aging yourself faster because of bad diet. Mitochondria are the power plants in every cell. With age what happens is the mitochondria decay. So you look in an old rat or an old person, the mitochondria are less efficient and they're putting out more side product. Byproducts of mitochondrial burning are oxidants. Just the way iron rusts or fat grows rancid, we're all going rancid from these oxygen radicals coming out of our metabolism. It's like an old car engine -- it's putting out more black smoke and getting less efficient. And so we've been interested in how to tune that up and make it better. We can do that, but there are lots of things you can do that will age your mitochondria faster, and one of them turns out to be not getting enough vitamins and minerals. So not only do you need fuel in your diets -- the fat and carbohydrates -- it's also 40 different micronutrients. These are the vitamins and the minerals and the essential fatty acids that you need to keep all your biochemistry humming along. If you don't get enough iron you're in trouble;, if you don't get enough zinc you're in trouble. You look at the population, they're eating this god-awful diet. You drink a sugary soft-drink, you get 10 teaspoons of sugar and no vitamins and minerals, It used to be calories were hard to get and people ate fairly dilute food and got their vitamins and minerals. Now we eat a donut or a sugary soft drink or a glass of wine and you get no vitamins or minerals in that. But it fills you up. So we're finding all kinds of vitamin and mineral deficiencies age your mitochondria faster. If you don't get enough iron -- and we're talking about a quarter of menstruating women aren't getting enough iron, less than half the requirement -- we showed your mitochondria go to pot. They start pouring out oxygen radicals, byproducts, into the cells. If you don't get enough zinc, the same thing will happen. We're showing it for a number of things. The poor are eating the worst diets, and the obese are really bad; obesity means you're eating a bad diet almost by definition. So you need to exercise because it keeps your mitochondria healthy. And you need to eat a good diet. It's what your mom told you a long time ago. If you're eating just calories, then you're going to get fat, I think in part because you're always hungry because the body's craving all these missing ingredients. People worry about tiny traces of pesticide residues -- that's all irrelevant. The really important thing is what you're eating. The solution isn't very complicated -- a multi-vitamin-mineral pill that's kind of an insurance pill. A multivitamin mineral doesn't have enough magnesium and calcium, because they'd make the pill too big. So you should eat some yogurt every day, low fat, and maybe take a little extra magnesium. And also you need to eat fish a couple of times a week because fish has DHA, which is a long-chain Omega-3 fatty acid and 30 percent of the brain is made of DHA. A lot of people don't eat fish. (Fish oil supplements) do the job. There's no sense trying to make people live longer if they're shortening their lifespan by smoking or eating lousy diets, and we're talking about a sizable percent of the country. What we've been doing is looking at rats that get a good diet -- much better than people do -- and trying to see what we can do to make the mitochondria in old rats look like more like young rats. See Part Two: Cutting edge research in life extension All rights reserved. � 2005 United Press International. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by United Press International.. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of United Press International. Related Links TerraDaily Search TerraDaily Subscribe To TerraDaily Express ![]() ![]() Misplaced keys, faltering name recall, incomplete thoughts -- by age 50, many otherwise healthy adults begin to notice these insidious symptoms, all signs of short-term memory loss. Indeed, as we age, our memory function can decline by as much as 45 percent, researchers have found.
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