Category Archives: Health

Life Extension

Mice have been reprogrammed to partially rejuvenate.

Faster, please.

[Update a while later]

Here’s more, from Scientific American:

Kaeberlein says the study suggests it may be possible not just to slow aging but to actually reverse it. “That’s really exciting—that means that even in elderly people it may be possible to restore youthful function,” he says. Plus, it is easier to imagine a treatment that makes changes to the epigenome than to consider going into every cell and changing its genes. He also notes that the results of the new study are very similar to those seen when senescent cells—those that have lost function due to aging—are removed from an organism. It is not yet clear, he says, whether “this is another way to shut down or maybe reprogram senescent cells.”
Manuel Serrano, an expert on senescence at the Spanish National Cancer Research Center in Madrid, was not associated with in the new research but says he is impressed with the study and its results. “I fully agree with the conclusions. This work indicates that epigenetic shift is in part responsible for aging, and reprogramming can correct these epigenetics errors,” he wrote in an e-mail. “This will be the basis for future exciting developments.”

Let’s hope.

Repeal, Delay, Replace

That’s the Republicans’ plan to undo the legislative atrocity that is ObamaCare.

[Update a few minutes later]

Democrats plan a fight to save ObamaCare. I agree with Stephen Green:

If you — or GOP lawmakers — aren’t mentally prepared for the howls, the accusations of racism/sexism/etc, the tales of woe, and the panic-mongering, then you don’t understand how Democrats play this game.

The ugliness hasn’t even begun to begin.

Sadly true.

Sugar

Is it killing us?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that some 75 million Americans now suffer from metabolic syndrome. If sugar consumption is the trigger, as 50 years of research suggests, then it might be as much of a direct cause of diabetes as smoking cigarettes is of lung cancer. Without sugar in our diets, diabetes might be an exceedingly rare disease—as it appears once to have been.

When Yudkin and others suggested as much in the 1970s, the consensus opinion among nutritionists and physicians was that dietary fat was the primary dietary evil; they considered sugar relatively benign. We have been living with the consequences ever since.

It’s worth noting this in the context that lifespan has fallen for the first time in decades: “If you like your longevity, you can keep your longevity“:

In story after story, we read about demographers and medical experts puzzling over what’s gone wrong. They point to heart disease, obesity, drug use, stroke, Alzheimer’s, suicide. The USA Today article notes that since World War II, it’s been rare to see a rise in U.S. mortality rates, and such spikes have usually been linked to highly specific events such as the spread of AIDS in the early 1990s, or a “nasty flu season” in 1980. By contrast, what we’re seeing now are rising mortality rates involving a broad range of causes, especially among middle-aged Americans.

Missing from all these accounts is a single word that ought to command unblinking attention: Obamacare.

While I agree that wrecking the medical-insurance industry is part of the problem, and may account for the most recent decline, it’s compounded by criminally awful nutrition advice from the FDA. One way or another, federal policies are killing us by the millions.

[Update early afternoon]