Longevity Micronutrients, Triage Theory & Vitamin D for Healthy Aging | Dr. Bruce Ames

Live Longer World Podcast #12

Live Longer World Podcast Episode #12 has been released!

My guest today is Dr. Bruce Ames who has received several awards and accolades for developing the Ames test which is used to detect carcinogens in commercial products. He showed how there were carcinogens in products such as hair dyes and children’s pajamas!

Later, Dr. Bruce Ames turned to studying micronutrients and how deficiency of important vitamins and minerals leads to accelerated aging. He came up with the Micronutrient triage theory, which says that when nutrient intake is insufficient, the body has a rationing mechanism and favors proteins needed for immediate survival at the expense of protection against future damage.

If you are deficient in say magnesium, the little magnesium you have will be rationed to the proteins needed for survival. This means that the other DNA repair enzymes that are not needed for survival in the short-term but play an important role in repairing the DNA in the long term will not receive adequate Magnesium and hence will not be able to perform their functions. And this will result in you accumulating DNA damage over time which will accelerate your aging and perhaps lead to cancer and other diseases.

In short, the micronutrient triage theory showed how a deficiency in important vitamins and minerals can lead to accelerated rates of aging.

Dr. Bruce Ames is 93 years old and says that he is still exercising and eating healthy greens cooked by his lovely Italian wife! However, he says his cognitive capacity has slowed down (this is why we need rejuvenation therapies, even for the brain: listen to my episode with Dr. Jean Hebert who talks about Brain Aging and his strategy to reverse aging through replacement of the body parts).

I am grateful that I had a chance to converse with him on Vitamin D, longevity micronutrients, how micronutrient deficiency can lead to accelerated aging, his take on the science behind reversing aging, and his advice to younger people.

This is a shorter episode and I hope you learn more about the importance of micronutrients!

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Listen to the Podcast:

Apple Podcasts: here

Spotify:

YouTube:

All Platforms: here

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Related Writing:

• My post explaining the Micronutrient Triage theory

• My post on Longevity Foods: Let’s cut through the clutter (Nutrition Doesn't have to be so complicated)

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Time Stamps:

00:00 Live Longer World

00:36 Bruce Ames Intro

1:50 Micronutrient triage theory

5:40 Micronutrient deficiencies & age acceleration

9:10 Vitamin D for healthy aging

12:26 CHORI Bar

14:46 Measuring micronutrients (blood finger-prick)

16:55 Bruce Ames diet

18:19 Asthma caused by obesity / bad diet improved by CHORI bar

21:21 Dr. Ames lifestyle over the years

22:47 Importance of zinc

24:15 Nutrition is complicated

24:44 Dr. Ames last words & advice for young scientists

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Extensive Show Notes & Transcript:

Dr. Ames, you came up with the micronutrient triage theory and say that most of us view vitamins and minerals from a short-term perspective, whereas we should be viewing them from a longer-term perspective. You showed how deficiency in micronutrients can lead to accelerated rates of aging. Can you elaborate on that?

• The body has all kinds of defense systems, there are 50 different enzymes creeping along your DNA, looking for a bump that shouldn't be there. So if you get damage to your DNA, then when it divides, you can make mutations

• Body is faced with their 35 known vitamins and essential minerals that we need to get from our diet since they're used in our metabolism. And so if you're short of any of them, you're in trouble

• If you don't have any magnesium come in, magnesium is needed in few hundred enzymes. And zinc. People don't think about think a lot, but there's something called zinc fingers in metabolism that recognizes your DNA sequences, and 2000 enzymes requires zinc other wise they don't work

• I was interested in gene regulation and then gradually found myself in nutrition

• So what happens when you have say limited magnesium in your body? What nature does is this strategic rationing. So it wants to put magnesium in enzymes that are essential for survival, so you don't die. And so, I wrote a paper, I called it triage, this rationing, so what what's logical is that nature puts it into those essentially for survival and stars.

• So nature puts magnesium into enzymes that are needed for survival and starves the ones that are needed for long-term use. So basically you age faster. So you're trading a long life for not dying now. So in the short term, it doesn't have such a detrimental impact, but in the long term you see the onset of a lot of age-related diseases because of these deficiencies.

So what have you seen in terms of the link between having these micronutrient deficiencies and the acceleration of aging? One thing you’ve spoken about is the immune system getting weaker because of these deficiencies.