Ever feel like you’re aging faster than your years? For Baby Boomers, premature aging is cause for concern. According to a recent AARP survey, nearly 3 out of 4 adults age 48 to 66 fear they’ll need to work at least part-time into retirement to survive financially, while half anticipate never retiring at all. This highlights the importance of preventing chronic diseases in aging Boomers. Yet, if you’re like many Boomers, you regularly engage in unhealthy habits that produce dangerous free radicals and cause you to age faster than your years. As you probably already know, free radicals are highly reactive atoms or molecules that are produced in the body by natural biological processes or introduced from the outside. They can damage cells and tissues through a process called oxidation. Some free radical production is normal and your body is designed to handle it. Yet, excessive free-radicals damage your cell’s DNA, membranes, mitochondria and other structures, and over time, cau…

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…

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…