Bruce Ames, PhD, is one of our nation’s most distinguished scientists. Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Nutrition and Metabolism Center at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, Dr. Ames leads a group of researchers dedicated to the study of how poor nutrition leads to the degenerative diseases associated with aging, with their attendant astronomical costs to our nation. Ames has developed a theory, which he calls his Triage Theory, to explain much of the chronic disease common today in the modern industrialized countries. Whereas gross deficiencies in vitamins and minerals are rare in affluent nations, modest deficiencies are common. Ames reports that most of the world’s population, including in the US, is moderately deficient in one or more of the 30 or so essential vitamins and minerals. Because the damage done by moderate vitamin and mineral deficiencies is insidious, says Ames, it…

There isn’t a vitamin more important to your health than vitamin D. You need it to build and maintain strong bones. Your immune system is crippled without it. Vitamin D deficiency appears to raise the risk of almost every chronic disease, from cancer to diabetes to cardiovascular disease to age-related cognitive decline to auto-immune disease. Yet professor and nutrition researcher Peter Horvath at the University of Buffalo School of Public Health and Health Professions in Buffalo, New York, reports that during Buffalo’s winter months, nearly 50% of the population in Buffalo has insufficient levels of vitamin D, while 25% are outright deficient. “Every cell in your body,” he says, “is responsive to vitamin D. If you’re deficient, you won’t see the health effects for years and it could take months to get your levels back up.” Dr. Horvath is probably using the standard definition of vitamin D deficiency—a blood level of less than30 ng/mL (or 75 nmol/L). However other vitamin D e…

Your body is harboring a couple of potential saboteurs! The words saboteur and sabotage come from French mill workers who would throw their wooden shoes, called sabots, into the machinery at work to make it break down or halt as a form of protest. The two potential saboteurs threatening to break down your body are inflammation and oxidation. Both are body processes that are helpful under normal circumstances, but if they get out of control, watch out!  If they’re allowed to develop into chronic inflammation and oxidative stress, they become health saboteurs of the first order and play a major role in every chronic disease, in problems with energy, and in the aging process itself. Unfortunately, almost everyone today is being damaged by these saboteurs. This is how it happens. Inflammation is the body’s response to injury, irritation or infection.  Cutting your finger, for example, will initiate an inflammatory process that enlarges blood vessels (the reason…

The Sugar Season will soon be upon us!  Halloween candy, Thanksgiving pies, sugary Christmas treats and holiday cookies and cakes in between, until New Year’s Eve, when we all resolve to eat healthier next year! But Americans overindulge on sugar all year long. According to nutrition experts at Tufts University , we each average 30 teaspoons of added sugar (sugar not naturally found in foods) daily—over 100 pounds of sugar per person per year!  So what’s the harm in adding a little sweetness to our lives?  Well, a little is fine—2 pieces of fresh fruit a day and even occasional treats made with honey and other natural sweeteners.  But the huge quantities of refined white sugar, and high fructose corn syrup in processed foods, that have become a normal part of the American diet are a major cause of disability and disease. Numerous studies link excess sugar consumption with arthritis, age-related macular degeneration and cataracts…

Certain populations have borne the brunt of COVID-19 illness and deaths; and they all are especially likely to be deficiency in vitamin D.  Older folks don’t fare well with the virus. Adults over 65 years of age represent 80% of hospitalizations & have a 23-fold greater risk of death than younger people. The elderly are likely to be vitamin D deficient due to inadequate diet and also because as we age we become less able to manufacture vitamin D in our skin from sunshine. Almost everyone who has died of COVID disease had co-morbidities, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease, high blood pressure, cancer, lung disease, neurological disease, kidney disease or obesity. Scientific studies have associated all of these conditions with vitamin D deficiency.  Now it has become apparent that significantly more people of color are contracting and dying from COVID-19 than their white counterparts.  Although black Americans repre…

How much thought do you give to dietary fiber? If you’re like most of us, it’s not a priority—but it should be! Dietary fiber is one of the most important determinants of your health! Almost everyone today does not get enough fiber in their diet. Our lack of fiber awareness has created a health crisis. Lack of fiber is a major contributor to our epidemic of chronic disease and can be a significant factor in causing diabetes, cancer, heart disease, obesity, depression and other mental illness, allergies, autoimmune syndromes, and infections.   Why is fiber so important? Dietary fiber, plant material that can’t be digested, is essential to our health because it nourishes the healthy flora in our guts known as the microbiome and helps to maintain the health of our gut tissue. Your health is completely dependent on the health of your gut flora. Healthy flora helps to digest our food and enhance the absorption of nutrients. They produce certain essential vitam…

Don’t look now, but we’ve all got a population of “zombie” cells living in our bodies!  Like us, cells are born, have a life and die. Ideally, when they lose their ability to divide and reproduce through damage or simple aging, they “commit suicide” in an orderly process called “apoptosis.”  But some cells, although no longer functional, refuse to die. Instead they linger on, generating chronic levels of inflammation and producing protein-digesting enzymes that cause accelerated aging to organs and tissues, increasing our susceptibility to chronic disease. Called “senescent” or “senile” cells, a robust immune system could destroy them, but as we age, our immune systems weaken, and these zombie cells accumulate. In 2011, researchers genetically modified mice so that their senescent cells could be triggered to self-destruct, which increased the mice’s lifespan by an amazing 2025% while greatly retarding development of chronic disease. This caught the attention of the…

Gut HealthOne good thing about getting older is that we generally become more self-accepting, warts and all.  And if we’re getting a little paunchier in our mid-sections, in the broad scheme of things it’s just not the big deal it would have been in our greener years. Besides, as my good friend Alice says, “everybody’s fat now.” But cosmetic issues aside, gaining fat is an indication that our cells are in trouble. The fact that we’re hardly alone in this predicament doesn’t mean it’s not something to be concerned about. A spreading middle means we’re headed in the wrong direction—the direction of premature aging and chronic disease. Fat cells produce inflammatory chemicals, and chronic inflammation is a common denominator of chronic disease. Being overweight increases your risk of high blood sugar and is the single best predictor of developing type 2 diabetes. High blood sugar causes glycation—a “sugar-coating” of proteins, and since our bodies are made of protein, gly…