New 'old' ideas

Modern humans have been on a crusade to battle aging and it is a battle we wage within since the same process that makes us live is the same process that produces the stuff that wore us down until we eventually die. For five decades, we thought that how we age and why we get diseases were born out of wear and tear from unwanted stuff called “free radicals” wandering around our body as we live and breathe. But now, the tides of science seem to be turning as these “unwanted stuff” seems to have been credited far too much for being responsible for the aging process when it might just play a really small role.

Until recently, scientists have been explaining the aging process to be the result of our cells creating a byproduct as it burns energy — the energy we need to live. This byproduct is called a free radical. This free radical is like the friend of the friend you always want to invite to the party. You do not like the friend but your friend will not go without him. Worse, this friend of your friend always comes to the party without a date and has the tendency to hit on other people’s dates or just mess up a huddle in a party. It always desperately needs to bond and sometimes, this bonding causes reactions in the body that is what we thought to be the damage caused by aging. The longer you live, the longer you need your cells to burn the fires that will make your body move and grow, and the more chances you would give for free radicals to mess up the biological party you have inside you. Thus, you naturally wither with age.

Enter the group of antioxidants — the molecular party fixer brigade that apparently knows how to handle the radical and prevent it from doing damage to your body. They clean up the mess of the radicals. Antioxidants have become like the celebrity age busters of the health and beauty circles for decades.  They have been distilled into overpriced juices from exotic fruits. They have squeezed them into pills and creams, which many buy to soak their cells with them or lather on to their wrinkles.

Enter new studies — party poopers with their new studies and evidence. Now armed with better knowledge about genes, scientists are saying that they have sound evidence to claim that how you age may be scribbled in your genes — much less the result of the party-pooping radicals, and that antioxidants which were heralded all this time to be capable of doing the mopping up of all the mess that the radicals cause, may not really help us that much as we have believed.

The first study appeared in the journal Genome Research and reported in ScienceDaily last March 2008 entitled “Quantitative evidence for conserved longevity pathways between divergent eukaryotic species.” At first, when you realize that the scientists have come to suspect the longevity gene in humans based on what they have found out in worms (C. elegans) and yeast, you may say “huh?” I do not blame you. But they did this to see what is common in both organisms when these two are separated in natural history as coming to existence 1.5 billion years apart. This means that whatever gene they still had in common today that the scientists observed to be related to aging, it is responsible for their longevity. And, that means we can look for similar versions of the genes in humans and for the record, there are many genes in both worm and yeast that have counterparts in the human genome.

Also came this more recent study reported in BBC Dec. 1, published in the journal Genes and Development, which was done by a team from University College London. They basically just engineered the worm so that it will automatically get rid of the radicals, just as antioxidants do. And guess what? The worms that were made to get rid of radicals lived just as long as those who had to endure the radicals and the supposed damage they do. This study showed that antioxidants did not slow the biological aging of the worm.

How could science do this to us antioxidant fans? How could one thing that was considered really good for our health before now turn out to be feckless and a waste of our money? Shouldn’t science be more reliable? Well, there is no such thing as perfect knowledge. You cannot look to science the way you turn to saints, unchanging in the powers you believe they wield. Science is a way of knowing and how it knows, changes, depending on the tools available and on many other things. It can correct itself and reverse itself. There is nothing sacred about old ideas in science just because they are old and have been untouched. When they turn out to be wrong, then they are declared such, and we move on with new, better knowledge. If you think that is better not to move with knowledge as it grows, then you do not need a doctor to pronounce you old — you are old, no matter how young your cells are.

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