Anti-Aging Pt 1 - At The Cellular Level - User Manual For Humans S1 E17 - Dr Ekberg

Welcome and thank you so much for coming I'm very excited to have you here about

this very exciting topic which is anti-aging how many people here want to

get old nobody but we all want to live for a really long time so it used to be

that we believe that living for a long time meant automatically that you got

old but we have a different understanding of biological aging these

days so that's what we're going to talk about so the goal is to live for a long

time without getting old and when we talk about aging we want to talk about

function and we want to understand that aging really is nothing more than a

deterioration in function which is the same thing as a deterioration in health

and as we understand it in this office especially health is the same thing as

function health is when everything works that is supposed to work and so it is

with aging so when we can maintain the function longer then we can also put off

aging and we'll talk about some some broad mechanisms and some very very

specific mechanisms and details that they come up that they discovered lately

and also in this office when we talk about function we understand that we're

talking about the brain because in the body everything that happens in the body

is a result of the regulation of the brain there is no body part that

operates independently of your brain there's not a single cell that does not

depend on the brains regulation for its health and function so again when we're

talking anti-aging we want to talk about all of the factors that help the brain

maintain its function so the first cartoon at your age people get anxious

about taking so many pills but I can prescribe something for that so that's

the mentality that we want to get away from that there are no magic bullets

there are no no magic pills all the pill does is to cover up a symptom and make

the function get worse to keep the deterioration going so over the years

they have produced a very large number of aging theories it's something that

that mankind has been very very obsessed with for a very long time because we we

don't want we're afraid of aging we're afraid of dying so we want to would want

to stick around and we want to stay young so one theory is that aging is due

to stress simply wear and tear and other theory talks about free radical damage

and and free radicals are counteracted by something called antioxidants so if

we're deficient in antioxidants then the free radicals take the upper hand

and we age faster there's theories of genetic damage and mutations there's

theories of hormonal changes there is theories of mitochondrial degeneration

because the mitochondria which will have a separate talked about they are the

little things inside your cells that make energy and everything in your body

runs on energy so if the energy declines then that affects all functions in the

body so mitochondrial degeneration would

speed up aging and they have noticed with people who are older have less

functional mitochondrial then there's some guy called hayflick and he found

out that cells can only divide so many times before they die so that he came up

with the hayflick limit and he found that approximately 50 times is the

maximum number this cell can hide and then he just won't do it anymore so all

of these aging theories are partially correct every one of them can be

validated and you can hear you can see that okay well

this causes that this correlates with that so every one of them is correct

the interesting part now is the discovery called telomeres which we will

touch on today and then we'll have a separate talk exclusively for that

because telomeres explain and correlate and tie together all the other aging

theories and that makes it very very exciting it was so exciting in fact that

they've awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the mechanism of telomeres

and something called telomerase what we'll get to that so 2009 they called it

the greatest discovery ever can starting aging and the aging mechanism as might

be finally figured out how that stuff works these discoveries have given us

glimpses of the possibility of slowing and even reversing aging now that's

that's a big concept to swallow reversing aging means getting younger

than you were before that's kind of hard to wrap your head around but the it is

an actual possibility aging is not as inevitable as we have thought it's just

a built-in mechanism and now we're starting to understand

so the new understanding is that how many years you have left doesn't depend

just on how long you lived here it depends on how much do you have left of

your telomeres so telomeres are like the little protective caps on shoelaces so

you have here's a chromosome and the chromosome lines up and they look like

this basically and on here are billions and

billions of billions of G nucleo and nucleotides making up genes but at the

end here well we'll make it look like a shoelace this is not what it looks like

but here is a protective cap so built into the mechanism every time that a

cell divides then the the chromosome splits down the middle and it makes a

copy of itself along with the cell again but because of something built into the

chromosome because of the mechanism that it duplicates it is not possible to

duplicate 100% of the chromosome there's always some loss there's always a

portion of the end that gets wasted so in order for cells to be able to divide

at all because they knew this already the people who discovered the DNA

sequence they said this doesn't make sense

because if you can't duplicate the whole chromosome it should be able to

replicate even once and still be functional but what they found out and

what the Nobel price was for was the exact structure and function of this so

what this is it is essentially if you want to call it junk DNA meaning

it is DNA but it doesn't code for anything it has no purpose except being

there and taking up space but because it does that the body can waste a little

bit of it every time and it doesn't affect the information encoded in the

genome so it's a brilliant mechanism however at conception these are as long

as they will ever be and they have figured out it's about fifteen thousand

base pairs fifteen thousand units of telomere by the time you're born your

cells have already divided a bunch of times so you're down to about ten

thousand and then by the time they reached five thousand and nobody knows

exactly why but at that point the telomere is so short that the cell goes

into what's called senescence meaning it won't divide anymore with you

so our lifespan is essentially from conception to birth nearly fifteen to

ten thousand and one on the planet we go from ten thousand

and that's our lifespan so what we want to do then all of these other aging

factors are about how quickly does the telomeres shorten so if you can stop

wearing down the telomere you can stop aging completely that's 5,000 cents for

what look at what period in your life you have to 5,000 when you die oh yes

yes at that at that point the cells just

become dysfunctional and they won't divine anymore

so now this this study of aging becomes so much simpler because everything

correlates back to this mechanism so now we can still study bring the nutrition

and exercise and all that but it takes out a lot of guesswork because all we

have to do is to see how does it affect the telomere and if it wears down the

telomere quickly it's bad for you if it wears it down slowly or not at all it's

good for you so now we're going to step back a little bit from that and look at

the what some really big questions so what is life what is the life form what

is it that that's different about something that's alive versus a rock or

a grain of sand or a snow flake or whatever and something that's alive a

life form is something that can respond to its environment it means some kind of

detection system secondly it needs to be able to create energy because nothing

runs without energy that means it needs to take some form of carbon and oxidize

it and make carbon dioxide that's what all life-forms on earth do and then if

it wants to live more than a very very short time it needs to be able to

reproduce it needs to make copies of itself and then eventually some

offspring so all of these things are common to

what we call life in order to pull this off it needs six little things here and

I thought just rattle them off and we'll get into the details later

we need a brain and a nervous system we need a blueprint that's the DNA we need

a plan on how to put proteins and cells together we need building blocks you

can't build a house without bricks you can't build life-forms without without

building building blocks then we need stimulation the reason because nothing

happens without a reason nothing happens without stimulation we need energy and

then we need an elimination system because everything that's alive from the

very basic themselves they when you metabolize something you create waste

and that waste has to get out somehow so these are the basic steps of what's

really there here for life so those are the six things required by life and

aging is a functional decline in any of the above because that affects the

telomeres so let's expand a little bit about on that in terms of what does the

body need and now we're not talking so much about any life or work we're more

focused on humans now number one we need stimulation that's

activation of the nervous system that is primarily movement but it's also any of

the five senses and I put in parentheses thinking because

that is it is important but it's not the main thing that the brain does most

people believe that that's all the brain does and it's a very tiny portion of

what it is still important stimulation is huge

then the blueprint that's your DNA and in order for that DNA to work we need to

have adequate DNA repair the body has mechanisms to repair it and if that

happens properly then you'll have less degenerative disease and so forth and

it's not all about which genes you have it's which genes do you express because

you can you have a whole bunch of genes that you will never Express but it's

your environment and your lifestyle that determines which ones you will express

building blocks we need we need bricks and mortar so that's the proteins and

the fats and the minerals they make up the bulk of the materials but then

there's also the most important fats are DHA and EPA and those are the two things

that are in high quality fish oil that's why we talk so much about everyone

should take fish oil if you don't start today and never stop DHA which you only

get a few hundred milligrams from from a good quality fishel is 40 percent of the

bulk of your brain consists of DHA and fifty percent of every cell membrane

that's every cell membrane on a hundred trillion cells in your body is 50

percent DHA and since the sub membrane is

responsible for the signaling and the communication it determines what's

inside and outside the cell that's hugely important and the DHA and the

quality of that settlement membrane depends largely on the quality of the

fats making it out sixty percent of your retina is DHA so vision also depends on

it then EPA is not so much a building block it is a precursor but it's a

precursor for prostaglandin 3 which makes it a very very important

anti-inflammatory it's the body's most important natural

anti-inflammatory it's what balances things out in the body and what they

have found which we'll get into in another talk is virtually all

degenerative disease is related to a chronic state of inflammation much due

to toxicity so the epa here will counteract some of that inflammation

energy is generated in mitochondria

we'll draw a little book a little picture for you

very impressive but it will give you an idea so here's the cell and here's the

nucleus and in the nucleus you have all the chromosomes and put a few more XS it

doesn't look like a dead guy and then in here you have these little things that

looks like rice grains or something they they are mitochondria they are the

energy factor it's the powerhouse of the cell without the mitochondria you would

lose 95 to 98% of all your energy so as we age we get fewer of these and our

energy production goes down and that's one of the most important factors of

Aging and if we can boost the number of function of mitochondria we can reverse

a lot of the the effects of aging the energy that this guy makes is called ATP

and don't worry too much about all these terms but we'll get back to them but I

thought I'd throw them and just for for completeness ATP is the energy currency

in the body you don't use calories you use ATP that's the final form of

they're using and in order to make energy you also need vitamins and you

need coenzyme q-10 there's a lot of talk about this thing called Co Q 10 and the

reason is this is a molecule it's an enzyme that is manufactured by the

mitochondria by the cell it is used by the mitochondria and if you don't have

enough Co Q 10 you can't make ATP so one of the reasons that the function of

mitochondria decline is that the level of Co Q 10 declines so we want to do

some things to protect the mitochondria but then we want to add back some Co Q

10 to make sure that we have the fuel that they need the the catalysts that

they need to make a 10 Heat and if we are above 35 years old we need a special

form of Co Q 10 which is the active form

and that's called ubiquinol

so if you're going to buy it then look for the ubiquinol the coq10 works for

people who are under 35 if you're over 35 you definitely want to get to

and just as little parentheses on how detrimental some drugs can be one of the

most popular drugs right now is cholesterol drugs statin drugs and

because statin drugs act by inhibiting and interfering with the liver they

destroy Co Q 10 so I would never recommend anyone to get on a statin drug

but if you if you did then you want to definitely definitely take large amounts

of coke content with that to offset some of the effects

and then the body like we said it needs a an elimination system so every cell

has its own little detoxification system yeah and then we have kidneys and liver

to help out along with that because like we said everything that you burn in the

body created waste products and today we need a detox system for much more than

waste products we needed for all the toxins that we have in our environment

so the elimination system is hugely important and in addition to that we can

help it out with antioxidants and with doing a cleanse every now and then so

we'll be getting back to that aging factors so what are the the factors of

Aging well if we only have so many copies to make then aging is limited or

or an aging factors anything that limits the number of copies so if something

some part of our lifestyle makes us only you be able to make 40 copies instead of

50 then that just shortened our life and that again depends on the length of the

telomeres and the protective caps like we talked about the huge factor is

toxins and free radicals because they get in the way of this machinery number

two anything that interferes with the clarity of the copy so if you imagine

that you have a document and you put it on your Xerox

machine and you run a copy and then you take the coffee you put it back as the

original and you run another coffee and you run another and another and another

if you have a really good coffee or you might be able to do that 50 times if you

have a bad cop here after 10 copies or if you try to send a fax more than three

times you can't read it because there's so much distortion so anything in your

body cell that sort of distorts or destroys the quality of the coffee is

going to shorten your life and again toxins and free radicals are probably

the number one factor there I talk too much it seems it looks so short on my

nose so when we talk about the DNA then we have both the factors that stalks us

and free radicals which destroys the DNA but the body also has the mechanism to

repair the DNA so if that does isn't working properly then you sort of have

have two forces against each other so we need to have both a reduction in free

radicals and a proper repair mechanism in order for the DNA to work properly

generally generation of ourselves and then

anything that speeds up the rate of coffee if you're gonna make a copy every

week instead of every month then that's gonna make make you run out of coffees

much faster and what are some of the things that speeds up the copying will

stress burning your candle and both ends secondly sugar huge huge huge sugar is

about the only thing that isn't a toxin that will do this and sugar is is called

a mitotic or sugar actually stimulates insulin but insulin is called a

basically a cell dividing hormone it's the storage hormone and it it speeds up

the rate of cell division and then toxins in free radicals so as you can

see toxins free radicals they they come back at at every step of the process

here and one of the reasons that what we talk about is so important and why

supplements become so important it's not just to replace what's been missing in

the food but it's to counteract and offset the all of the toxins that we

have they have in the lasts in in this last century or so there's I think about

85,000 chemicals and toxins that have been used and released in the atmosphere

and the food the average person at any given time has

more than 700 toxins in their bodies then that don't belong there so that may

be the same single biggest reason that we need to take some extra supplements

and to take more than what is seems reasonable just to kind of balance this

out and then any factor in aging factors any factor that reduces or interferes

with energy production and you can pretty much repeat some of the same

factors so now that we understand sort of what what waits havoc then anti aging

becomes anything that reverses or compensates for this the number one

thing we want to do is stress reduction here we have chiropractic adjustments

like what we talked about before that new to you why that is a stress

reduction but the chiropractic adjustment is an interruption to

patterns running in your system so as we have as we respond to the stress we get

stuck in different patterns and one of the most powerful ways that chiropractic

works is to interrupt those patterns and get the body of concept

meditation is one of the most powerful things you can do for yourself and

exercise exercise is also about activation and stimulation and pattern

interrupts so all of these things help through stress reduction and then toxin

elimination obviously reduce the amount of processed foods and and junk food and

things that you know have have toxins and though unfortunately fish belongs in

this category today and it's one of the most beautiful foods ever found on earth

and now you're not supposed to eat it anymore

you eat it if you like but not once in a while but not because it's good for you

because there's so much heavy metals and contaminants in there and and then you

want to assist the body assist the elimination system with doing some

cleanses and number three here we touched on that supplements that restore

and assist the body so first we want to make sure that we get the quality

building blocks that we need and especially essential fatty acids those

are the ones that most people are so deficient in because they are destroyed

with food food processing and we need more of them as soon as we have

inflammation and stress we need antioxidants to counteract the free

radicals so we'll have a whole talk on free radicals and anti

and the king of antioxidants is called glutathione and that's

detsen the antioxidants have manufactured inside the cells and that

becomes important because it's the most important one but it's intracellular

which means that you can't get it from the outside of the cell to the inside

meaning you can't eat it because the body if you eat the blue tooth on the

body takes it apart first you can't get it through a settlement indirectly I'm

getting at that but the the mechanism is is different than something like vitamin

C or something that bet you just you just eat it and you have it

but glutathione the body takes it apart so what you want to do is you just want

to eat the part that is the hardest to get and then your body has the

components to to build it up again and it's on the list of supplements but the

most important one is called cysteine it's an amino acid and the form that you

that has the highest absorb ability is called n-acetylcysteine

and then you want to do you want to take some supplements to support energy

production which means mitochondrial support and we already talked about Co Q

10 or ubiquinol that's the main one but there are some others that you're doing

not not so much like Oprah 10 but that you're doing to protect the mitochondria

and glutathione is huge but there's some other antioxidants and some other

factors as well and then just finish up and talk a little bit about the brain

influences on telomeres because a lot of this stuff is is about the biochemistry

and what happens at the cellular level but being in a brain-based

office here we want to definitely emphasize that the brains behavior and

now we're talking sympathetic parasympathetic we're talking stress

responses so when we when we know that stress is detrimental we're really

talking about brain function because stress is about how the body how the

nervous system responds to stress so the the sympathetic response is the

fight/flight response and the more of it we have from the more we speed up the

shortening of telomeres

so stress tension upset degeneration low energy production catabolism which means

that you break things down rather than build things up and detrimental exercise

meaning exercise that you do at such a level that your body doesn't have the

time or resources to recover so all of these things will result in a

sympathetic dominance and will speed up the shortening of the telomeres on the

other side is all the stuff that we want to try to do more of which is to get

into the relaxation response the parasympathetic response and these are

habits that have to do with peace relaxation meditation regeneration

healthy mitochondria it's about anabolism and repair and

there is also beneficial exercise so all of these things this is just the

overview on anti-aging so we'll come back to all of these topics and we'll

have five or six more more workshops we will talk about the details of all these

things so we know that stress is not a good thing and the cartoon here says

honey when you're left for the office this morning you wrote happy vibrant

enthusiastic twenty five-year-old you want to talk about it

that's what stressful into you today so what can we do as individuals

we're just like I said laying the framework here but number one be willing

to learn understand that there's no easy fix for anything and in order to stay

motivated we have to know why we have to have the big picture otherwise we're

never gonna stick with anything to get adjusted because chiropractic is one of

the most powerful ways to interrupt distress response and we're probably

going to start doing a tests shortly that measures something called file

which is a measurement of DNA repair so what they found was people that had been

adjusted for more than a year or a year and a half they were asked for anomaly

better off in terms of DNA repair than the average person

three lifestyle learn how to eat better move better feel better for supplements

if it's missing or declining we have to add it back and the reason I express it

that way is there's lots and lots of good supplements around but if you go

into a health food store or if you go into if you open up a supplement

catalogue all they're going to talk about is take this pill for this symptom

so there are no better than a drug pusher in there in their mentality in

their mindset the the allopathic system the pharmaceutical system says if you

have this septum you take this drug if for it and if you take supplements the

same way you're just taking a natural drug instead of an artificial one and

yes you're way better off but we need to change the mindset we're not trying to

suppress symptoms or try to get things to work so that the body never expresses

symptoms because they're only a result of something that isn't working and

that's that's one of the main things that we're trying to to accomplish in

this office and with these talks is to for people to understand that health is

when everything works the way it's supposed to work and then we don't have

to worry about disease there is no place for disease and if everything is working

and I see if I can remember on my wall back here it says you can no more create

health by suppressing symptoms then you can create light by covering out the

darkness okay it's the same principle we're not

trying to take something for something if it's missing we'll add it back

because it's required that's it exercise exercise is about maximizing HGH which

is human growth hormone it's a fantastically rejuvenating hormone and

we can make it ourselves but we make it with a very specific form of exercise

which is extreme high intensity exercise and it's so intense that you only want

to do it for a few seconds every week but that's enough so we'll talk about

how that works and you want to reduce your toxic burden so you learn how to

eat cleaner and then you learn how to support your body with some practices

and those are just a good idea to do periodically so thank you very much for

your attendance and attention you have any questions