“Why we age” is a good question. I was hoping I could avoid aging or at least cover it up. When you think about it, we are actually lucky to experience aging. Some of our friends haven’t been so lucky. Still, aging is a stern taskmaster.
We have constant daily reminders: aches, pains and jars we can’t open. If that weren’t enough, every physical exam and lab report brings up curious anomalies we’ve never heard of.
Even if we eat right, exercise our diminishing butts off, and excel at the NY Times crossword puzzle, guess what? Yes, we’re on the escalator going down anyway. It’s as if now, in our glorious wisdom and experience, at a time when we’ve finally got most of the life stuff figured out, the Goddesses upstairs are laughing as they throw more challenges our way.
And yet, I fight on. Most of us do. We healthy seniors fight the War on Aging, and all is not lost. We slow down the rate of decay as best we can. Our cells—however well we treat them—seem to be programmed to age. Why? What happens?
Causes and Theories of Aging
The theory has traditionally been, “Aging is nothing more than the buildup of genetic and cellular errors.” I read noteworthy geneticists, gerontologists and healthcare practitioners who have generally accepted this shared mutational theory as to why we age. Our DNA gets corrupted and doesn’t repair like it should.
Then I read the discoveries of longevity scientists who found other causes of aging: errors in our mitochondiral DNA caused by oxidative stress. These errors are directly related to the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. We smoke, over eat, remain inactive, over indulge in alcohol, stress, and fail to get the sleep we need. Our cells react by triggering inflammation.
Mitochondrial Theory
The mitochondrial theory of aging proposes that age-associated mitochondrial defects are caused by the accumulation of toxins in DNA. Abnormal mitochondrial function is one of the hallmarks of aging in humans. Mitochondrion are the powerhouses of our cells, producing energy in a process called cellular respiration. Free radicals damage that process.
Simply put, damaged mitochondrial DNA mutates the DNA sequence. The accumulation of these changes is associated with age-related diseases, reduced lifespan, age-related weight gain, hair loss, greying, curvature of the spine, and osteoporosis, oh my!
Epigenetic Theory of Aging
Conflicting evidence is raising doubts about the free radical theory of aging. Recently, at the University of Tsukuba in Tokyo, Professor Hayashi and his team made a discovery I found very interesting. Age-associated mitochondrial defects are controlled by another form of regulation: epigenetic regulation. The research, published in Nature Publishing Group’s journal, posits that changes do not affect (mutate) the DNA sequence itself, rather, they turn genes on or off.
You see, while aging is determined by our genes, our genes are turned on or off by epigenetic regulation, and subject to environmental influences including nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle choices.
This Is Good News to Seniors
I hope you didn’t go to sleep reading about the science, but I wanted to share the good news: we actually have some control over our genes. We can do things that influence our genes to be turned on or off. As the epigenetic theory of aging indicates, exercise, diet and sleep all send messages to our genes to act or not to act.
The best book I’ve read so far that explains this is Younger: Reset Your Genes and Reverse Aging by Sara Gottfried, M.D. I suggest you get it if you have an interest in the science of how your genes predispose you to certain behaviors and conditions, and what we can do about them.
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