Read the transcript

Chronological age constitutes the central risk factor for major pathologies that limit healthspan, including cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and neurodegenerative diseases.

However reaching an old age does not necessarily though result in a higher degree of age-related disability. In other words there is great heterogeneity in the health outcomes of elders. This is evidenced by long-lived individuals from families expressing extraordinary longevity and with a lower prevalence of age-related diseases. They show “youthful” profiles for many metabolic and immune-related parameters and are considered “decelerated” or “healthy agers”.

The rate of aging is malleable, and poor health in late life is not inevitable. Contrary to the previously held belief that increased risk of diseases and disability with advancing age results from inevitable, as well as genetically determined intrinsic aging processes, more recent studies indicate that many of the usual aging attributes are due to lifestyle and other modifiable factors.

Organ systems throughout the body for example, show age-dependent declines in integrity even among young healthy people in their 20s and 30s. Targeting aging in younger, still healthy individuals should allow earlier intervention and damage avoidance. By the time chronic diseases are diagnosed, much damage is done and undoing it is difficult. It also stands to offset the economic burdens of a skyrocketing aging population blighted by multiple chronic conditions.

Today biomedicine takes on conditions one at a time (e.g. Alzheimer's), rather than attempting to stall incremental cellular damage and changes (caused by unhealthy aging) that lead to multiple conditions. Economic incentives in both biomedical research and healthcare reward treating diseases in isolation more than promoting true health.

For the past three decades reliable indicators of biological age, rather than chronological age, along with determinants of healthy aging, has been pursued. (Chronological age refers to the actual amount of time you’ve been alive. Biological age is therefore a truer measure of age than date of birth. Chronological age does not change, regardless of how healthy a lifestyle).

Only recently has there been success in quantification of biological age. Complimentary, findings that aging can be delayed in mammals have raised the credibility of prolonging human healthspan.

The target to identify aging biomarkers was to improve upon chronological age as a predictive risk factor and to enable earlier, proactive interventions; particularly lifestyle changes (additions, subtractions, modifications).

Methods to quantify biological processes of aging are now showing promise. Biological aging measures are designed to capture subtle, organism-wide shifts in physiological integrity. To be truly useful, such measures need to be able to tell exactly where a person is in their total lifespan (therefore must be predictive of the rate of aging).

While life expectancy has increased remarkably over the last two centuries worldwide (due to hygiene, antibiotics etc.), healthspan is not keeping pace because current disease treatment often decreases mortality without preventing or reversing the decline in overall health. People are now sicker longer, often coping with multiple chronic diseases simultaneously. Thus, there is an urgent need to extend healthspan

Human lifespan variation is mainly determined by environmental factors (with food choices and patterns being primary), whereas the genetic contribution is 25-30% and expected to be polygenic. Therefore personalized diets and fasting strategies offer promise in optimizing human healthspan and lifespan.

In this second episode, Joseph Antoun, Chairman of the Board and CEO of L-Nutra Incorpora...