AGING

Uncovering a Key to Human Longevity

By Gailon Totheroh
CBN News Health & Science Reporter

CBN.com – BOSTON Ever since Methuselah set the record for human longevity, quixotic explorers like Ponce de Leon, and even rational modern day researchers, have been searching for the fountain of youth. Now prestigious scientists at places like Harvard are saying they may have found a key to longevity that could add years, even decades, to human life. Their theory is that a substance in plants could help many more people start living to a healthy 100 years old.

The inability of science to get to the bottom of aging provided a motivation for Harvard researcher David Sinclair, even as a young student in Australia. "If we could just tap into that root cause and slow it down, we could have a really big impact on diseases around the world, and that would be a gift to humanity. I wanted to do that," he said.

That desire eventually led him to a substance called resveratrol, which is found in grape skins and 70 other plants. A resveratrol supplement, for which its manufacturer claims potent biological effects, is scheduled to be on the market soon. However the best current source is red wine.

In fact, when Italian winegrowers gather to toast one another's health, they may unknowingly be paying tribute to actual health benefits. Sinclair said, "We're not trying to make people live six times as long. I'd be happy if we could make people have another five, 10 years of healthy life without disease. But we are [concerned with] slowing down these diseases of old age that are really quite horrible for many people."

Before connecting grapes to longevity, Sinclair observed a related longevity booster severe calorie restriction. He said that merely feeding mice nutritious diets with 30 percent fewer calories makes them live 30 to 50 percent longer.

That may explain why so many Okinawans live to 100 they have very low calorie diets. Sinclair said, "It's about 60 to 70 percent of what's recommended for a healthy diet so it's really extreme. And most physicians wouldn't recommend it, even myself. I don't think it's particularly healthy unless you can do it under very strict supervision."

So how does drastic calorie restriction lengthen life? That is an important question, because Sinclair eventually discovered that resveratrol works the same way. An extremely low-calorie diet stresses the body. That stress signals a group of genes in the body to produce certain enzymes. These so-called "SIR2 genes" generate enzymes called Sirtuins. Sirtuins switch on defenses that protect all the cells in the body.

And while the low-calorie studies have been done on yeast, worms and mice, people have these very same SIR2 genes that extend longevity for lower life forms.

In experiments, some laboratory yeast have been genetically engineered to have more SIR2 genes, meaning they live about 30 percent longer, mimicking calorie restriction effects. For humans, that could mean 20 more years of life.

And here is where the grapes come in: the resveratrol activates these SIR2 longevity genes just like calorie restriction, but without having to modify man genetically.

So what evidence is there that resveratrol could enhance old age? To answer this, some evidence comes from looking at the results of consuming red wine, because it has the highest amount of resveratrol. Drinking red wine may explain the "French Paradox" the French eat more fat and calories, but have far fewer heart attacks than Americans.

Red wine may also explain why so many Italians on Sardinia live to 100. They drink lots of red wine. And, the world's modern longevity record belongs to Jeanne Calment, a daily red wine drinker who lived 122 years.

But before you start carting off cases of wine, consider the downside to wine consumption: To get the required daily dose of resveratrol from wine would be very expensive, at least $1,000 a year. Also, alcohol is very destructive of the liver and depletes the body of the vital mineral magnesium. And lastly, but most importantly, alcohol can cause addiction and destroy lives.

So how do you get enough of the good effects of resveratrol without the bad effects of alcohol? Alcohol-free red wine might work, except that even in alcohol-containing red wine, resveratrol levels vary greatly from year to year at the same vineyard. Table grapes are not the answer either, primarily because eating them does not extract the resveratrol as winemaking does. Sunlight also depletes the biological activity of resveratrol.

Perhaps try resveratrol supplements? Sinclair did tests on them and found they do not have enough of what are called "Sinclair units." That is largely because supplements tend to lose their benefits after manufacture, largely because oxygen in the air destroys the fragile resveratrol molecule.

But the good news is that Sinclair has developed a manufacturing process to preserve the resveratrol in pill form. He prefers not to say a lot about that pill because he was, until recently, the lead consultant to a company using the process to introduce what is believed to be the first stabilized resveratrol in a pill - a product called Longevinex.

Sinclair said, "Myself, I don't tolerate red wine very well and I don't want to drink red wine every time I get up in the morning, so having it in a pill form with no side effects (from the alcohol or prservatives in wine) is exactly what we're after."

Evidence from the use of Longevinex may finally prove resveratrol's human benefits, and the evidence for resveratrol is mounting. Investors have already funded four new pharmaceutical companies for the sole purpose of developing drugs to mimic natural resveratrol. The first pharmaceutical product may be a skin cream available in the next few years.

For the future, resveratrol and resveratrol-like drugs have the potential, for example, to keep America's rampant obesity from being such a deadly killer.

But for now, Sinclair says eat well and keep an eye on developments regarding resveratrol. "There is probably nothing ever that's going to be invented that can replace healthy diets. However, they might work very well together, and then we would really see the best benefits."

At Harvard Medical School's new research building, said to be the most advanced facility of its kind in the world, Dr. Sinclair and his colleagues are advancing the limits of our knowledge about aging, perhaps giving new meaning to the old Star Trek greeting, "Live long and prosper."

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