Then there are Centenarian studies.
There are three major centenarian studies going on around the world. They are trying to find the variable that would confer longevity among these people. Why do centenarians become centenarians? Why are they so lucky? Is it because they have low cholesterol, exercise a lot, live a healthy, clean life?
Well the longest recorded known person who has ever lived, Jean Calumet of France who died last year at 122 years, smoked all of her life and drank.
What they are finding on these major centenarian studies is that there is hardly anything in common among them. They have high cholesterol and low cholesterol, some exercise and some don't, some smoke, some don't. Some are nasty as can be and some nice and calm and nice. Some are ornery, but they all low sugar, relatively for their age. They all have low triglycerides for their age.
And they all have relatively low insulin. Insulin is the common denominator in everything I've just talked about. They way to treat cardiovascular disease and the way I treated my stepfather, the way I treated the high risk cancer patient, and osteoporosis, high blood pressure, the way to treat virtually all the so-called chronic diseases of aging is to treat insulin itself.
The other major avenue of research in aging has to do with genetic studies of so-called lower organisms. We know the genetics involved. We've got the entire genes mapped out of several species now, of yeast and worms. We think of life span as being fixed, sort of.
Humans kind of have an average life span of seventy-six, and the maximum life-span was this French lady at one-hundred and twenty-two. In humans we feel it is relatively fixed, but in lower forms of life it is very plastic. Life span is strictly a variable depending on the environment. They can live two weeks, two years, or sometimes twenty years depending on what they want themselves to do, which depends very much on the environment.
If there is a lot of food around they are going to reproduce quickly and die quickly, if not they will just bide their time until conditions are better. We know now that the variability in life span is regulated by insulin.
One thinks of insulin as strictly to lower blood sugar. Today in the clinic there was a patient listing off her drugs, she listed about eight drugs she was on and didn't even mention insulin. Insulin is not treated as a drug. In fact, in some places you don't even need a prescription, you can just get it over the counter, it's treated like candy.
Insulin is found as in even single celled organisms. It has been around for several billion years. And its purpose in some organisms is to regulate life span. The way genetics works is that genes are not replaced, they are built upon. We have the same genes as everything that came before us. We just have more of them.
We have added books to our genetic library, but our base is the same. What we are finding is that we can use insulin to regulate lifespan too.
If there is a single marker for lifespan, as they are finding in the centenarian studies, it is insulin, specifically, insulin sensitivity.
How sensitive are your cells to insulin. When they are not sensitive, the insulin levels go up. Who has heard of the term insulin resistance?
Insulin resistance is the basis of all of the chronic diseases of aging, because the disease itself is actually aging.
We know now that aging is a disease. The other case studies that I mentioned, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, obesity, diabetes, cancer, all the so-called chronic diseases of aging, auto-immune diseases, those are symptoms.
If you have a cold and you go to the doctor, you have a runny nose, I did Ear, Nose and Throat for ten years, I know what the common treatment for that is, they give you a decongestant. I can't tell you how many patients I saw who had been given Sudafed by their family doctors for a cold and they came to see me after because of a really bad sinus infection.
What happens when you treat the symptom of a runny nose from a cold and you take a decongestant? It certainly decongests you by shutting off the mucus. Why do you have the mucus, because you are trying to clean and wash out the membranes, and what else? What else is in mucus? Secretory IgA, a very strong antibody to kill the virus is in the mucus. If there is no mucus, there is no secretory IgA.
Decongestants also constrict blood vessels, the little capillaries, or arterioles that go to those capillaries, the cilia, the little hair-like projections that beat to push mucus along to create a stream, they get paralyzed because they don't have blood flow so there is no more ciliary movement. What happens if you dam a stream and create a pond?
In days you've got larvae growing. If the stream is moving, you are fine. You need a constant stream of mucus to get rid of and prevent an infection. I am going in to this in some detail because in almost all cases if you treat a symptom, you are going to make the disease worse because the symptom is there as your body's attempt to heal itself.
Now, the medical profession is continuously segregating more and more symptoms into diseases, they call the symptoms diseases. Using ENT for example, that patient will walk out of there with a diagnosis of Rhinitis which is inflammation of the nose. Is there a reason that patient has inflammation of the nose? I think so. Wouldn't that underlying cause be the disease as opposed to the descriptive term of Rhinitis or Pharyngitis?
Some one can have the same virus and have Rhinitis or Pharyngitis, or Sinusitis, they can have all sorts of "itis's" which is a descriptive term for inflammation. That is what the code will be and that is what the disease will be. So they treat what they think is the disease which is just a symptom.
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