Tips on Anti-aging: Ageless

At the recent New Zealand Medical Association CME (Continuing Medical Education) South meeting, one of the guest speakers was an internationally acclaimed professor of genomics, Michael Fenech.

I was particularly interested in Michael’s presentation as it dealt with the issues that relate to the individual’s interaction with the environment and the nutritional options presented to that individual. Quite apart from some statistics about the huge volume of food that Americans eat relative to the rest of the world, the interesting use of the term ‘nutrisome’ was introduced.

Essentially what Michael was saying is that apart from the macronutrients, protein, carbohydrates and fats, the micronutrient environment (the ‘nutrisome’) plays an incredibly important part in the methylation and acetylation of our genetic data bank, these processes being the librarians of the data bank.

The balance between these micronutrients is critical and preserves the genetic code not only in maintaining it but also stopping its degradation.

The degeneration of the genetic code is identifiable through biomarkers, and there is a proven association between the increase in the appearance of specific biomarkers and the increased incidence of diseases and early death.

So you would think, that being given information about your genetic code and an understanding of what you eat and the influence of your environment, you could come to some conclusion about your allotted time.

The number of variables is ginormous, and although the neocortex of the human is somewhat marvellous, we will need greater computing power than we have as individuals.

This computing power isn’t far away; the most important thing is to collect accurate data. All data is interpretive and may represent truth or variations thereof and hence may confound the outcome.

Medical IT companies like those who have produced online medical diagnostics, Babylon and Ada, ask a number of questions about symptoms – and some questions about yourself such as age, height, weight, previous health – and come up with a much better than guess result.

But when it comes to the artificial intelligence decision tree attempting to seek and maintain health, the task is much, much more fraught.

I thought the answer lay in the millions of genetic variances. It only partly does, however, and in fact, the answer lies within the proteogenomic and metabolomic outcomes telling the story of what is actually happening and not just what could happen.

COVID-19 has taught us many lessons. For me, the individual’s vulnerability is predictable. Such predictability means that we can understand unique data coding and metabolic signals, and this understanding gives us the opportunity to protect those at risk.

We can maybe safely extrapolate using data from these less favourable outcomes. Age is not the defining factor for poor outcomes.

Poverty is.

Wealthier people statistically live longer, especially those who don’t overindulge. Their micronutrient availability is better and balanced.

Methuselah got the perfect balance.