Aging is essentially a process in which your cells lose their resilience, they lose their ability to repair damage because the things you might never have heard of until now, like mitochondria and telomeres, aren't working the way they should. Aging is about how the body loses it ability to repair it self due to the cellular break down.

 

What causes some people to age faster then other? Aging happens from both the inside out and the outside in. Aging is about how you respond, adapt to, and deal with the stressors that affect you from the outside. Aging is really about the rate of aging, specifically, how the outside and inside factors accelerate or decelerate your aging. Your aging is affected by your lifestyle, health practices, inflammatory processes, genetics, self repair mechanisms, and cell damage.

 

There are many things you can do to slow the rate of aging. You can get your weight down to healthy BMI level, exercise and increase your strength, and get quality sleep.

Another way to slow the rate of aging is to understand how genetics influences aging and how you can control your genes. Controlling your genetics can help you avoid the major age-related diseases and improve the chances that you'll spend more time with your grandkids than you will in the doctor’s waiting rooms.

 

One way is through the rebuilding of chromosomes. Your chromosomes have small substances on the ends called telomeres. Think of them as being like those little plastic tips of shoelaces. Every time a cell reproduces, that telomere gets a little shorter, just as the shoelace tip wears off with time. Once the protective covering on the tip is gone, your DNA and shoelace begin to fray and are much harder to use. That's what causes cells to stop dividing and growing and replenishing your body. The cell realizes that it is no longer helping the body and commits suicide (that's called apoptosis), which can contribute to age related conditions. But your body also has a protein called telomerase that automatically replenishes and rebuild the ends of the chromosomes to keep cells (and you) healthy.  However, lots of cells in your body don't have telomerase, meaning that many of them have reproduction limit, thus putting a cap on how well your systems can be replenished. The amount of telomerase depends on your genetics, but we’re now starting to see that we can influence the size of those little tips, the telomeres.

 

In a widely publicized report, researchers at Harvard Medical School and BIOMOL Laboratories have demonstrated that resveratrol activates a “longevity gene” by activating a cell’s survival defense enzyme, which prolongs the time cells have to repair their broken DNA.

 

One of the known causes of aging and death is that older cells lose their ability to perfectly replicate DNA in every new cell. DNA “mistakes” accumulate and allow little pieces of DNA to become active and print themselves out, so to speak, creating a type of “DNA debris” that eventually stops a cell from functioning effectively. It is similar to printing out a report and having a couple of pages at the end not contain any relevant information-so you throw them away. The cell can’t throw away the extra “printed out” DNA; it accumulates and clogs up the cell. This build up of “debris” is connected to aging, and the death of individual cells. Resveratrol reduces the frequency of “DNA debris” by 60% through the longevity gene that is stimulated.

 

Resveratrol’s ability to activate the gene has to do with its chemical structure, not its antioxidant potential. It works by increasing the rate of a reaction known as “deacetylation.” Acetylation reactions affect whether a gene is “off” or “on.” This is extremely important. In cancer cells, for example, genes are activated that aren’t supposed to be and vice versa. By controlling deacetylation and augmenting the longevity gene, resveratrol is able to confer some serious life extension benefits-at least in the laboratory organisms.