My National Senior Health Examiner.com column is not just for seniors, but applies to health information for all ages. For example both children and seniors are susceptible to falls. Please also check out my other Examiner.com health columns online in addition to my daily local Sacramento Nutrition Examiner column. People of all ages are curious about dense nutrition and caloric restriction and the affect on health.
The health information is valuable to people from all age groups and all walks of life. Also those who work with people of various ages need to know what movements can help people as they age or when very young. Some of the issues are similar such as keeping one's balance better and improving nutrition habits.
For example, there are exercises kids and seniors can do to build better balance and visual-brain depth perception so you can build better judgment of how high a curb or step is or be aware of sidewalk issues to avoid stubbing your toe and tripping. Check out my other columns on health and nutrition. Some are national and others are local.
One example of intergenerational health and nutrition news is anti-aging foods. Actually, the anti-aging concept is more like slowing down the progress of "rapid aging" so that it's gradual and graceful. The foods appeal to all ages. A hot topic in the news is the competition between anti-aging foods and anti-aging drugs that vary from expensive growth hormones to inexpensive resveratrol used to mimic caloric restriction by some.
Which will win here in Sacramento, anti-aging foods and food extracts or anti-aging drugs? The race is heating up, with UC Davis in the Sacramento and Davis regional area focusing on studies of plants. For example, in the Sacramento area, UC Davis has been researching nutrition topics such as research with fruit and plant extracts for improving lifespan possibilities.
One example is the anti-aging properties of strawberries. See the UC Davis Strawberry Study site at the UC Davis Nutrition Department done in the past. The University of California - Davis and Baylor College of Medicine teamed up to study the effects of fresh vegetable juices on weight loss and lowering blood pressure.
Will caloric restriction win or will nutrients from plants lead in the race to find anti-aging health benefits? Or is the race really between food and hormones or food, caloric restriction, and hormones, or food as medicine alone?
There seems to be an evolving controversy in science in the race to discover anti-aging drugs before researchers reveal anti-aging foods. Apparently, a gene's action may help explain why restricting diet lengthens life in animals, according to the August 18, 2010 Eurekalert! news release, "Discovery may aid search for anti-aging drugs." Check out the latest study, "Genes encoding longevity: from model organisms to humans."
Interestingly, there seems to be a 'race' of sorts between finding foods that play a role in anti-aging, helping to switch on genes that slow down aging, and at the same time in a variety of universities another 'race' to find an anti-aging drug based on experiments of restricting calories, but not nutrition in animals.
Several years ago, UC Davis nutrition scientists also ran a 15-week study to test whether diets that contain potatoes would be useful in weight loss or maintaining current body weight and how these diets affect your blood sugar. The study back then was called the UC Davis Department of Nutrition - Potato Study. Also check out the article, UC Davis Study Discredits "Dirty Dozen" List | andnowuknow.com. You may also want to read the Study: Effects of Potatoes in a Weight Loss Program - Full Text .
The Search for Anti-Aging Drugs
According to the August 18, 2010 news release, "Discovery may aid search for anti-aging drugs," the news seems to focus on looking for a way to develop anti-aging drugs rather than foods based gene suppression. A team of University of Michigan scientists has found that suppressing a newly discovered gene lengthens the lifespan of roundworms.
The leap that science hopes to provide is to find out how this applies to humans, since there are some similar genes between roundworms and humans. The research focuses on caloric restriction. Similarly, at UC Davis, the research also focuses on not only caloric restriction, but the type of nutrition that's helpful in maintaining health.
Scientists who study aging have long known that significantly restricting food intake makes animals live longer. But the goal is to find less drastic ways to achieve the same effect in humans someday. The U-M results offer promising early evidence that scientists may succeed at finding targets for drugs that someday could allow people to live longer, healthier lives.
In a study published in an issue of Aging Cell, "Genes encoding longevity: from model organisms to humans," U-M scientists found that a gene, drr-2, is an important component in a key cellular pathway, the TOR nutrient-sensing pathway, where many scientists are looking for potential drug targets. Can specific foods or drugs derived from foods lengthen or shorten lifespan?
The U-M scientists then found that when they caused the drr-2 gene to be under- or over-expressed, they could lengthen or shorten lifespan in C. elegans, a worm widely used in research. Manipulating the drr-2 gene's action produced the same effects as reducing or increasing caloric intake.
"We showed that in C. elegans, drr-2 is one of the essential genes for the TOR pathway to modulate lifespan," says Ao-Lin Allen Hsu, Ph.D., the study's senior author and a scientist at the U-M Geriatrics Center. He also is an assistant professor in internal medicine and molecular and integrative physiology at U-M. The study also found that drr-2 appears analogous to a human gene, eIF4H, that controls similar cell functions.
The idea is to find paths for developing future anti-aging drugs
To find possible avenues for future anti-aging drugs, many scientists around the world are focusing on signaling pathways in cells that sense nutrients. The one Hsu examined, the target of rapamycin pathway or TOR pathway, is so named because its activity can be influenced by the drug rapamycin. Recent results from a large federal study being conducted at U-M and elsewhere have shown that in mice, rapamycin is effective at mimicking the anti-aging effects of dietary restriction.
Why aren't more scientists looking for anti-aging foods rather than drugs? Is it because you have to follow the money, and there's less money in anti-aging foods? Who would be interested in anti-aging foods other than consumers, farmers, and natural or organic grocery and produce food stores?
Research in the last 25 years has shown that animals, including mammals, live longer and have lower levels of certain measures of age-related decline when scientists have restricted their food intake. No one has been able to show yet that the same effect happens in humans, though some studies are under way. There are groups in Sacramento where people follow restricted calorie diets, raw food diets, vegetarian diets, and vegan diets, low-carb diets, and various types of diets. You'll find many of these groups online.
Nationally, you can look for information and see whether there's a local chapter of the Calorie Restriction Society in your local area. See the website, Help the Calorie Restriction Society Raise Research Funding.
Active members of the Calorie Restriction Society have had a positive influence on the degree and direction of calorie restriction (CR) research in humans for a number of years now, helping scientists who have demonstrated that fewer calories mean less age-related disease and quite probably more healthy life, according to the Calorie Restriction Society.
As is true of many of the best patient advocate and pro-research advocacy groups, the Calorie Restriction Society has close ties with the scientific community; members have stepped up to the plate to help human studies happen more rapidly. You can find links to a number of more recent results at the websites, The Longevity Meme, and also including these sites: Calorie Restriction and the Heart and The Evidence For Calorie Restriction.
Now the society is stepping up again, this time to raise funding for further CR research. This initiative will build upon existing relationships with talented, well known scientists to correlate gene expression and cell signaling indicators in human calorie restriction practitioners to clinical markers of health and aging.
In essence, this work will continue to raise the bar in proving beyond a doubt that CR in humans is very beneficial to healthy longevity. You can find more information about the researchers in a PDF format release at the society website.
If you're interested in the new calorie restriction study mentioned on the Calorie Restriction Society's website, a key aspect of the new study will be to build on the calorie restriction study reported by Dr. Fontana in 2004. The idea with research is to find out whether long-term calorie restriction with adequate nutrition results in the same metabolic, hormonal, and gene expression changes in humans that scientists have seen with caloric restriction in rodents.
According to the August 18, 2010 press release on the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor research, "Genes encoding longevity: from model organisms to humans," when calories or certain nutrients are restricted, scientists detect less oxidative damage in animal cells and a slower decline in DNA repair, a decline that normally occurs with age. It's thought that limiting oxidative damage and slowing the decline in DNA repair could help postpone or avoid many age-related diseases.
But scientists know relatively little about why reducing food intake causes these effects. In the last 10 years, they have made progress in identifying genes and associated proteins that are suppressed when diet is restricted. By learning more about the cell processes involved, they may be able to discover targets for future drugs that could delay aging without the need to restrict food intake.
Drugs tailored to block specific genes or proteins involved in nutrient-sensing pathways would have much more appeal than reducing what one eats. To achieve anti-aging benefits, it's thought that people would have to restrict food intake by 30 to 40 percent, a grim prospect. In addition, drugs might be designed to avoid other disadvantages of this level of dietary restriction, which include reduced fertility.
Why study caloric restriction in the roundworm? Its genes are found in other animals
C. elegans is a tiny roundworm, a nematode whose two-week lifespan is a great advantage for scientists studying aging. The 1-millimeter-long transparent worms have other advantages, too. C. elegans exhibits many age-associated changes observed in higher organisms.
"Many genes identified in C. elegans to control the speed of aging turned out to be evolutionarily conserved, meaning that you can find them in other animals, too. And many are very similar to those found in humans," Hsu says in the news release.
Research details
Hsu and his team created different mutant strains of roundworms, some with drr-2 genes silenced and others in which the gene was over-expressed. They wanted to learn whether inactivating drr-2 is essential for TOR to influence longevity, and found that it was. Other newly discovered genes may affect TOR signaling as well. But Hsu's team has found a promising lead for anti-aging drugs of the future: They were able to show that silencing drr-2's action alone was sufficient to make worms live longer than wild-type C. elegans used as controls.
"It is known that reduction of TOR signaling in response to a change in the environment or genetic manipulation triggers a cascade of cellular signals that alter cell growth, metabolism, and protein synthesis, and decrease the pace of aging," says Hsu. "Our recent studies have shown that drr-2 might play a pivotal role in the TOR signaling network to control protein synthesis as well as longevity."
The news release also mentioned additional U-M authors: Tsui-Ting Ching, Alisha B. Paal, Avni Mehta, and Linda Zhong, all of the Division of Geriatric Medicine, U-M Department of Internal Medicine Funding: Ellison Medical Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Citation: DOI: 10.1111/j.1474-9726.2010.00.
Showing Seniors and Kids how to Prevent Falls
Check out an excellent book, How To Prevent Falls: A Comprehensive Guide to Better Balance [Paperback], by Betty Perkins-Carpenter. Today, on Veria TV, the show, "What's the Alternative? " presented simple exercises on how to prevent nasty falls.
One out of three persons over the age of 65 will risk falling and breaking bones or causing traumatic brain injuries, bleeding in the brain, loss of balance issues, or broken teeth. But certain exercises can help strengthen your sense of balance. Check out the Web MD site, How to Prevent Falls.
Too many tips focus on how to put grab bars up in your home or prevent loose rugs from catching in your shoes but don't mention enough exercises you can do to improve your balance. Also see the guidelines at the sites, What are Ways to Prevent Falls and Related Fractures? and Fall prevention: 6 tips to prevent falls - MayoClinic.com.
Kids also can fall frequently because they run so fast or may not look where they step. See, Fall safety for kids: How to prevent falls - MayoClinic.com. Visual exercise such as bouncing a ball on a paper target on the floor, dancing with a pillow to practice stepping backwards, and tossing a ball from one hand to the other all can train the brain to have stronger visual coordination is helpful for senior citizens to help train the brain and eyes toward a stronger ability to maintain balance.
As people age their ability to balance changes, especially after age 75. Exercises focusing on eye-hand coordination such as gently tossing a tennis ball from one hand to the other and slowly dancing backwards helps strengthen your ability to keep your balance. Gradually, you increase the space between your hands, but not enough to make you lose your balance.
You also can hold onto the back of a sturdy chair and stand on one foot then the other...gently. These were some of the exercises demonstrated in the Veria TV show. The point is to go slowly and have something sturdy to grab onto so you won't fall as you're exercising to increase your visual depth perception and balance.
The goal is to be able to recognize how far away is that crack in the sidewalk that can make you trip or that curb or step as you walk out of your house or down the street. Practice of specific exercises for balance helps to program your brain and eye-brain coordination for improving balance. Check out the book, guidelines, and TV programs for older adults that focus on improving balance. What actually works?
One exercise such as slumping into a chair can prepare you to slump and relax, totally go limp if you do trip or stub your toe and fall, so that you lower the risk of going rigid, breaking bones, or smash the side of your head against the ground.
The book How To Prevent Falls is based on Dr. Betty Perkins-Carpenter's unique Six Step Balance System, designed to teach seniors how to prevent falls and avoid potentially devastating injuries, while increasing energy and maintaining independence through a series of safe, easy and fun to do balance exercise activities.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statistics, one of every three persons over age 65 falls each year. Of these, 20-30% will suffer moderate to severe injuries causing reduced mobility and independence and greater risk of death. For those over age 85, falling is the leading cause of death.
Besides exercises mentioned in the book, also, practicing Tai Chi and Qi Gong learned from DVDs, Internet videos, pictures, or in a classroom for lifelong learning, can help build up your balance. If you had a fall and later become dizzy or unable to keep your balance as you walk down a corridor in your residence, you could be having a brain bleed that needs to be stopped, for example a subdural hemotoma. But exercises that seem simple can build enough eye-hand coordination and stepping backwards without falling to build up your ability to balance.
Dancing slowly backwards holding a lightweight pillow also can be of help. Check out the cleverly proven exercises that really do help you balance and understand how to fall more safely if you accidentally fall. By slumping as you fall, you're less likely to break bones than if you fell with your hands forward and rigid trying to protect your face.
By slumping, for example, you fall more softly and tend not to fall on your face, but on your side or back without falling head first on the pavement. You practice by slumping into a chair. Also, you'll practice stretching before you get out of bed in the morning.
This book can save your life. This book is invaluable for anyone that is beginning to experience a lack of balance. It is filled with easy exercises and movements that are designed to improve a person's balance and awareness of their bodies.
It has a series of easy stretches to do in bed, before you get up in the morning that are a great way to start the day. It has been carefully researched. Check out the book.
The author runs balance workshops. She knows that details matter. The book also contains "FitNotes" that point out important but subtle details that are helpful. If you're over age 65, have balance issues at any age, or want to strengthen your balance whether you have a problem or not, check out this book. It's also great for those working with seniors or for caregivers.
Also check out all my nutrition, health, or cultural media columns such as my Sacramento Nutrition Examiner Column, Sacramento Healthy Trends Examiner Column, Sacramento Holistic Family Health Examiner Column, Sacramento Media & Culture Examiner Column, and my national columns: National Senior Health Examiner column, National Children's Nutrition Examiner Column, and National One-Pot Meals Examiner column.
Follow Anne Hart's various Examiner articles on nutrition, health, and culture on this Facebook site and/or this Twitter site. Also see some of Anne Hart's 91 paperback books at: iUniverse, and Career Press. Or see the author's website.
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