By Dr. Mercola
In the video posted on Rejuvenation-Science.com, Dr. Bruce Ames, Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at U.C. Berkeley and senior scientist at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, explains his development of an inexpensive intervention that could delay age-related diseases, such as:
- Cancer
- Cardiovascular disease
- Cognitive decline, and
- Immune dysfunction
(Please beware the video can only be viewed with Internet Explorer.
I've created a full transcript of the lecture, available for download under the Sources at the end of this article that you can peruse if you have trouble with the video.)
Dr. Ames is among the most cited of scientists in any field with more than 540 published papers to his name.
Dr. Ames' Triage Theory
According to Dr. Ames' research, most of the world's population has inadequate intake of one or more of the micronutrients that a balanced diet should provide.
His "nutritional triage theory" posits that humans have developed a metabolic rebalancing response to micronutrient shortage that favors short-term survival while damaging long-term health.
One example of this is when calcium is released from your bones into your bloodstream as a short-term survival response to reduce overacidity.
The long-term consequence of this can be osteoporosis.
According to Dr. Ames, as reported by Rejuvenation Sciencei:
"Triage theory predicts that the consequence of moderate shortages of even a single micronutrient ... will result in insidious damage (e.g.: increased DNA damage) that, over time, leads to the acceleration of age-associated diseases (e.g.: increased cancer). As people with modest deficiencies have no overt clinical symptoms, there has been little incentive to correct these deficiencies".
His theory on nutrient triage is likely also true for excess intake of nutrients like sugar. If you eat too much sugar, your body will raise insulin levels, which prevents you from dying from high blood sugar but will kill you slowly from insulin resistance. This is the reality for many, as one in four Americans is already either pre-diabetic or diabetic. Fructose, primarily in the form of high fructose corn syrup accounts for the vast majority of Americans' daily calories, and "liquid sugar" is a major culprit in the skyrocketing rates of obesity and diabetes. Half of the U.S. population over the age of two consumes sugary drinks on a daily basis.ii
Dr. Ames believes his triage theory can "help put micronutrient nutrition on a firm foundation and lead to preventive medicine for age-related diseases."iii I believe he's onto something, and encourage you to take this information to heart.
Eating a Bad Diet Speeds Up the Aging Process
Like Dr. Ames, I believe poor nutrition is a primary factor for premature aging and onset of age-related disease. In his lecture, he explains how your body burns the food you eat to make ATP (adenosine triphosphate), which acts as the basic fuel for all your cells. But you also need about 40 different micronutrients to keep your body functioning properly. This includes vitamins, minerals, and essential amino acids and essential fatty acids. Ideally, you would get all of them from your diet; hence the term "balanced diet." According to Dr. Ames, when you're deficient in any of these 40 micronutrients, it destroys metabolic pathways that will accelerate your aging:
"We're not eating a healthy diet. We're eating too much refined food with sugar. The leading source of calories in the United States is sugary soft drinks – 40 grams of sugar and no nutritive value. We're starving. Even though we're all getting fat, we're starving for vitamins and minerals."
Nutritional Deficiencies Can Damage Your Genes
Dr. Ames shows that virtually all micronutrient deficiencies tend to lead to chromosome breaks, which of course is one of the most dangerous aspects of radiation damage, as it can promote cancer. The same danger seems to apply to simple nutritional deficiencies. Three or four types of cancers have been associated with folate deficiency, for example. But cancer is not the only potential outcome.
"Low or high homocysteine, which accumulates under conditions where you low in folate or low in vitamin B12, is associated with cognitive decay and with heart disease," Dr. Ames says in his lecture.
Iron deficiency, which affects about two billion women and children worldwide, also negatively affects your brain, and can reduce IQ. However, too much iron is also detrimental. It can be just as dangerous as too little.
"Metals are very tricky," Dr. Ames says. "People think that if a little bit of vitamin is good, more is better... Particularly, minerals are tricky because iron looks very much like copper and zinc. If you put in too much iron, you hurt copper and zinc. It interferes with [absorption]... Calcium and magnesium look very much alike. They're right above each other on the periodic table. If you get too much calcium, that'll trash some magnesium enzyme and vice-versa.
Your body really wants about two calcium's to one magnesium. So all you supplement makers, don't make magnesium pills and don't make calcium pills. Make calcium-magnesium pills – about two to one... [S]imilarly with sodium and potassium... [I]f it's a mineral, you really have to be careful about the amount, and you have to be careful about ratios."
You're Designed to Survive and Reproduce; Longevity is "Optional"
In Dr. Ames' research, all the vitamins and minerals tested led to DNA damage when cells were deficient. But why would nature promote disease such as cancer just because your body is deficient in a nutrient? In his lecture, Dr. Ames explains:
"Nature wants you to survive and reproduce. That's what the strong selection is for... [Your body doesn't care about] DNA repair... unless when it's a matter of survival. The first priority is survival and reproduction."
Essentially, the theory is that whenever you have a nutritional deficiency, what little of that vitamin or mineral you do get is used up by proteins involved with survival or reproduction. All other proteins go without. The price you end up paying for being deficient then is premature aging, and onset of age-related diseases caused by mitochondrial and/or DNA damage.
Vitamin K Deficiency and Osteoporosis
This natural favoring of essential proteins—those involved with short-term survival—naturally end up having a wide range of medical implications. As an example to illustrate how Dr. Ames' triage theory works, let's look at vitamin K. Vitamin K is a coagulation factor for blood clotting. It's used in plant photosynthesis, so anything green contains vitamin K. When a mammal consumes this plant food, the vitamin K gets into the liver, where the coagulation proteins are created. It's then converted to menaquinone (MK), which is transported to the tissues.
Of the 16 proteins that require vitamin K, about half of them are necessary for blood coagulation. These are considered "essential" as their functions are required for short-term survival; otherwise, you'd die from uncontrollable bleeding from minor cuts and scrapes. The other half are non-essential proteins—what Dr. Ames refers to as "longevity proteins" involved in making you live a long life, as opposed to tending to your immediate survival or reproduction.
In tests, knocking out any of the essential coagulation factors (with the exception of one) turns out to be lethal. This suggests that our bodies evolved to protect coagulation factors against lethal vitamin K deficiency by sacrificing other vitamin K-dependent proteins when there's not enough to go around. Loss of those functions not necessary for short term survival is linked to age-related diseases. Hence vitamin K deficiency is associated with:
Tragically, just about NO ONE that is not eating large amount of fermented foods gets sufficient amounts of vitamin K in their diet, according to vitamin K expert Dr. Cees Vermeer, whom I interviewed on this topic two years ago. Most people get just enough K from their diets to maintain adequate blood clotting, but NOT enough to offer protection against the health problems listed above.
How to Keep Calcium from Depositing in Your Arteries
Osteocalcin is a protein found in the extracellular matrix of bone and dentin. It's involved in regulating mineralization in your bones and teeth. Vitamin K deficiency is associated with bone fractures, and those taking drugs to inhibit blood clotting also tend to be at increased risk of fractures. Growth arrest-specific 6 (GAS6) is a human gene coding for the Gas6 protein. Animal studies have demonstrated that when you destroy this gene, the mice pups will suddenly drop dead from rapid calcification of the arteries...
But how and why does the calcium leave the bone and end up in the arteries?
Dr. Ames explains that calcium-binding proteins travel around the soft tissues looking for crystallizing calcium deposits, which it gobbles up wherever they find it. But if there's genetic damage, this process is inhibited, which can have lethal consequences. There's a rare genetic mutation that cause premature death from calcification of the arteries, but this can also occur if there's severe vitamin K deficiency, as this deficiency can damage to the GAS6.
"[E]verything fits," Dr. Ames says. "Vitamin K deficiency is associated with the calcification of the arteries, and people getting Coumadin die at a much higher rate of calcification of the arteries. But the docs who give you Warfarin don't know about all this. This work was all done by a terrific group in Holland. We didn't do any of the work. We're just interpreting it in a different way.
... There's a Japanese food called natto... It's Bacillus subtilis fermented soybean. It's full of one of these MK derivers – MK7. So if you eat that, you help all these long-term proteins... [Many] Westerners just don't like it. But the epidemiologists all say that the Japanese who eat it have very little heart disease. They get very little prostate cancer, and it all sort of fits."
The Synergistic Actions of Vitamin K with Vitamin D
Another nutrient also plays a crucial role in arterial calcification, although Dr. Ames does not specifically mention it in his lecture. That nutrient is vitamin D. Vitamin K and vitamin D create a highly beneficial synergistic effect, and together, they work to increase MGP or Matrix GLA Protein, which is the protein responsible for protecting your blood vessels from calcification. In fact, MGP is so important that it can be used as a laboratory measure of your vascular and cardiac status.
If you are concerned about your bones, you must balance a nutritional triad:
- vitamin D
- vitamin K
- calcium
Increasing calcium is good for your bones but not so good for your arteries, which can become calcified. Vitamin K protects your blood vessels from calcifying when in the presence of high calcium levels. So you really must pay attention to the synergism of all three of these nutrients if you want to optimize your benefits.
Two Basic Types of Vitamin K
Vitamin K can be classified as either K1 or K2:
- Vitamin K1: Found in green vegetables, K1 goes directly to your liver and helps you maintain a healthy blood clotting system. (This is the kind of K that infants need to help prevent a serious bleeding disorder.) It is also vitamin K1 that keeps your own blood vessels from calcifying, and also helps your bones retain calcium and develop the right crystalline structure.
- Vitamin K2: Bacteria produce this type of vitamin K. It is present in high quantities in your gut, but unfortunately is not absorbed from there and therefore most of it is passed out in your stool. K2 goes straight to vessel walls, bones, and tissues other than your liver. It is present in fermented foods, particularly cheese and the Japanese food natto, which is by far the richest source of K2.
Vitamin K2 can convert to K1 in your body. Making matters even more complex, there are several different forms of vitamin K2. MK8 and MK9 come primarily from dairy products. MK4 and MK7 are the two most significant forms of K2, and act very differently in your body:
- MK4 is a synthetic product, very similar to vitamin K1, and your body is capable of converting K1 into MK4. However, MK4 has a very short half-life of about one hour, making it a poor candidate as a dietary supplement. After reaching your intestines, it remains mostly in your liver, where it is useful in synthesizing blood-clotting factors.
- MK7 is a newer agent with more practical applications because it stays in your body longer; its half-life is three days, meaning you have a much better chance of building up a consistent blood level, compared to MK4 or K1. MK7 is extracted from the Japanese food called natto.
How to Get More Vitamin K into Your Diet
Eating healthy amounts of green vegetables will increase your vitamin K1 levels naturally, especially kale, spinach, collard greens, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts. For vitamin K2, cheese and especially cheese curd is an excellent source. The starter ferment for both regular cheese and curd cheese contains bacteria—lactococci and proprionic acids bacteria—which both produce K2. You get the benefits of these bacteria when you consume them. Both types of cheese have the same amount of K2, but curd cheese has less fat.
If you eat 100 grams of cheese daily, you get 45 mcg of vitamin K2, which will lower your risk for heart attack by 50 percent, according to existing studies. You can obtain all the K2 you'll need (about 200 micrograms) by eating 15 grams of natto daily, which is half an ounce. It's a small amount and very inexpensive. If you don't care for the taste of natto, the next best thing is a supplement.
Remember you must always take your vitamin K supplement with fat since it is fat-soluble and won't be absorbed without it.
You need not worry about overdosing on K2—people have been given a thousand-fold increase over the recommended dose over the course of three years have shown no adverse reactions (i.e., no increased clotting tendencies). Although the exact dosing is yet to be determined, Dr. Vermeer recommends between 45 mcg and 185 mcg daily for adults. You must use caution on the higher doses if you take anticoagulants, but if you are generally healthy and not on these types of medications, I suggest 150 mcg daily. It is quite likely that doses of several times that amount are safe for the average person, but we just lack the research to confirm it at this time.
Do Our Longevity Proteins Need Special Nutrients?
Again, whenever there's a nutritional deficiency, your body has ways of preferentially making the essential proteins, but not longevity proteins. The latter are essentially sacrificed whenever there's not enough to go around.
To illustrate this point, in the Rotterdam Study, which was the first study demonstrating the beneficial effect of vitamin K2, those who consumed 45 mcg of K2 daily lived seven years longer than those getting just 12 mcg per dayiv... According to Dr. Ames triage theory, this makes sense, as the lower dosage did not provide enough vitamin K to keep the longevity proteins properly supplied, so longevity was sacrificed for more immediate survival (or reproductive) needs.
According to Dr. Ames, about half of all proteins are longevity proteins.
This led him to consider the possibility that there might be an entire class of vitamins and minerals that nobody knows about, which help regulate the longevity pathways. The reason they would have been able to remain undiscovered is because research on vitamins and minerals are based on short-term effects that typically result in overt clinical symptoms. He believes his team may have discovered one such longevity-related nutrient so far. They're still looking for others.
Until we have more information, your safest bet will always be to strive to eat a balanced and varied diet of whole, natural (preferably organic) foods, taking care to avoid processed and genetically engineered foods that are nutritionally inferior.
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