Immunity + Longevity

Immunity plus longevity. Longevity, you know, when you're young, the word longevity probably is not that important to you. When you get to be 74, which I am, the word takes on a different meaning. Longevity really infers that somehow we can have some impact upon the length of days that we live on this planet. And beyond longevity, there is also what's called hellspan, the number of days that we live on the planet with healthy, disease free days. Those all interrelate then to the question whether these are variables, whether they can be modified, whether they're reducible, or whether it's just the luck of the draw and there's nothing we can do about it. In the past, I think it's been felt that aging and ultimately your life expectancy was pretty much genetically determined. We had a little control over it, but. But over the past numbers of decades, and I started in this research actually when I was a Professor in the 70s, we have seen extraordinary progress being made in really understanding the biological mechanisms that associate with the aging process. Starting with fruit flies and small worms and working our way up the animal kingdom to where we're starting to understand certain mechanisms that associate with what we call senescence. And we're starting to recognize that many of those processes are modifiable. If we understand how they're processing and we can then use the appropriate interventions, we can start to turn back some of that biological clock that's associated with that kind of aging process. It may not change the overall lifespan of the species, but it certainly can change our life expectancy and improve our opportunity for a healthy, long life. What Dr. James Freeze talked about in his landmark article in the New England Journal of Medicine, talking about compressing illness, but into the last few moments of our life and then just transitioning over at the limits of our life span. That's a really interesting and different approach than starting to see yourself as aged and functionally decrepit and hospitalized and really non functional for the last 20 or 30 years of your life, which is a sequence of events that many people unfortunately experience. So here we're starting to really look at the biological mechanisms, the MTOR pathway, AMP kinase, all these various interesting things that relate to the biological mechanisms of mitochondrial function and oxidative stress and free radical injury and how that interfaces with protein, aging and how diet plays a role in that, and certain nutrients that seem to be antiseinescent agents. One thing that we have certainly learned is that diet and circadian rhythms and biology all interface together with, with the biological aging process. So the extraordinary work we're recently seeing about the use of time, compressed eating. So we have time sequence eating. We have periods of fasting. All these things are new revolutions as to how the immune system relates to how we eat, when we eat, and basically our frequency of eating, and, in fact, how that influences our immune system that then influences these biological processes that are identified, associated with senescence and aging. So stay tuned. We're going to be at the frontier of this discussion. We're going to be talking about these kinds of interventions and personalizing therapy through the immune system that lead to the opportunity to fight back against senescence. And that relates to, obviously to a term called immunosenescence, aging of the immune system. The immune system can be returned back to a functionally lower biological age with the appropriate intervention. That's the focus of our community of Big Bold Health.