Health Matters

Wouldn’t it be interesting if we ended up learning about how we age and why our aging journey is often bumpy, from our shoelaces? Well, not our shoelaces exactly, just the tips of the laces. Do you remember what those little plastic things on the end of our shoelaces are called? They’re called aglets and it turns out that our strands of DNA have aglets at each end as well, except on DNA they’re called telomeres. Some very smart people noticed that our telomeres get shorter as we age. THEN, some really smart people asked – “I wonder if we age because our telomeres get shorter?”

We’ve been told for a long time now that “as we age our hormone levels plummet.” However, I believe that we may have it the wrong way around. I think we age because our hormone levels drop. It seems to me that our hormone levels dropping, telomeres getting shorter and experiencing less than optimal health as we age are all related and are more a cause of age related fragility than a symptom.

Until we know a lot more there is not much we can do about our shrinking telomeres and at the moment we might be stuck with our genes, however we can absolutely do something about the diminishing hormone levels right now. I believe the answer is bio-identical hormone replacement therapy (BHRT). The operative word here is bio-identical. The hormones that we use to replace what we are losing MUST be exactly the same as the ones our bodies make. They can’t be hormones made from plants and the urine of another species. Hormone supplementation from yams and horse urine will give some of the physical benefits of the original but the problem lies further down the metabolic highway.

Our metabolic pathways are hardwired. This magnificent biochemical lab called the body that we inhabit will take the molecules we provide in the form of food, chemicals, supplements and nutrients and change those molecules in order to extract the materials it needs to run our natural processes. The by-products of this process are metabolites. Metabolites are the ash that is left from the fire after the metabolism has extracted what it needs. If the original source of metabolic fuel was familiar to the body the metabolites will be familiar and there will be processes in place to safely eliminate them. However, if the original source was foreign to the body, the metabolites will be foreign as well so the system will be forced to force them into pathways not hardwired to handle them. The result is chaos down the line. This chaos presents itself in a myriad of different ways from vague, weird illnesses to cancer.

As I’ve said in previous articles, this issue is exceedingly complex where everything is connected to everything else. Change one thing and a host of others change as a consequence. It’s a juggling act with an unknown number of balls in the air at any one time but for our purposes right now we’ll shamelessly oversimplify and whittle the major players down to three: Testosterone, Estrogen and Human Growth Hormone (HGH).

Over the next couple of weeks we’ll look at these hormones and how replacing them in a safe, rational, scientific way will enable us to spend our “twilight years” with a much higher quality of life. Next week´s subject, Testosterone.