As we age, some of this higher organization of various molecules and structures, along with the communication systems to control them, slowly breaks down.  This is due partly to the loss of high energy ATP necessary to maintain this organization, and partly to our genetic programs that control the synthesis and turn-over of various molecules and enzymes at the cellular level.  

Cells, tissues and organs like our heart, brain, and skeletal muscles require high-energy molecules like ATP from mitochondria to drive almost all of our cellular, organ and tissue processes.  If you ever wondered how we move our muscles and limbs, we need mitochondrial energy in the form of ATP and organized structures both within and outside cells to do this, as well as nerve cells to transmit the messages from our brain to our muscles to execute these movements.

As we age, some of this higher organization of various molecules and structures, along with the communication systems to control them, slowly breaks down. This loss of organizational control is increasingly visible as we get older, and in our last days it becomes very obvious that our systems and organs are no longer highly coordinated and under strict control.  

If you’re a science buff like me, here’s a bit more to digest! An important part of the control and organization of our tissues and organs depends on our ability to move nutrients (and molecular messages) to various places where they are utilized, and, when these nutrients are in excess, to store them properly in cells and tissues until they are needed.  Our cells also break down structures and molecules that are no longer needed or are functionally deficient, and they recycle the subcomponents of these structures or individual molecules and repair them or destroy them and remove them from cells. Eventually the molecular remains that are removed from cells, organs, and tissues are sent to the gastrointestinal system for further degradation and elimination.  This system works like a series of conveyor belts that move molecules around our bodies, from nutrients being imported to degradation products being exported out of our cells and tissues and sent to organs for secretion.  This whole process of building components and structures and later tearing them down and recycling or eliminating their parts when they are no longer functional requires cellular energy, and this is also an important part of aging.   As we get older, our bodies seem to do less building and more tearing down, and there is less coordination in the process.

How can we reverse this?  One validated way is to keep moving—literally.  Continuing to move and exercise, even in our later years, helps to maintain our muscle mass and stimulate the processes that maintain our body’s structures and functions.  Another important ingredient in aging is to maintain the energy necessary to keep building new molecules and structures and to maintain existing structures that are essential.  This is where Membrane Lipid Replacement with NTFactor® Lipids comes in—providing the essential membrane lipids that build mitochondria and other cellular membrane systems in order to provide the energy to keep our molecular conveyor belts moving.  

Prof. Emeritus Garth Nicolson, PhD, MD (H)
The Institute for Molecular Medicine
Huntington Beach, California

References:

Nicolson GL. Membrane Lipid Replacement—a functional approach to repairing cellular membranes, reducing symptoms,  and restoring function.  Functional Food Science 2022; 2(8): 198-204. https://doi.org/10.31989/ffs.v2i8.990

Nicolson GL, Ferreira de Mattos G, Settineri R, Breeding PC. Membrane Lipid Replacement and its role in restoring mitochondrial membrane function and reducing symptoms in aging and age-related clinical conditions.  Nature Cell Science 2024; 2(4): 238-256.
https://doi.org/10.61474/ncs.2024.00038

Get Adequate Sleep

Did you know that inadequate sleep can show up in your skin? It’s true. Levels of cortisol—the stress hormone—decrease when we sleep, but when a good night’s sleep is interrupted or cut short, cortisol can linger at higher levels. That is bad news for your skin, as high levels of cortisol can contribute to the breakdown of collagen, making your skin age faster. Sleep issues can become more common as we age, so it’s important to develop good sleep habits and stick to them. Establish a regular bedtime and wake-up time; avoid large meals, caffeine, or exercise late in the evening; and turn off your screens in the evening to spare yourself both their blue light (it can keep you awake!) and the stress and anxiety that fictional drama or current events can bring. Develop good sleep hygiene and reap the benefits! 

Don’t Forget the SPF

It’s no secret that diligent sunscreen use helps protect your skin from the harmful rays that can be a contributing factor to skin cancer—but did you know it can also keep you looking younger? Studies have found that daily, diligent sunscreen use can reduce photoaging (wrinkling, spotting, and loss of elasticity). In fact, daily sunscreen users were 24% less likely to show increased signs of aging over the duration of the four-year study. Many daily moisturizers contain SPF, but it’s important to remember that sunscreen needs to be reapplied after a few hours in the sun, and after swimming or heavy sweating. It’s a good idea to keep a tube handy throughout the day. Studies have shown that chemicals in sunscreen can be absorbed into your skin, so it’s recommended to choose a mineral sunscreen (zinc oxide or titanium dioxide based), which are generally recognized as safe and effective.

Take Up Yoga

We know that age can take a toll on things like flexibility, posture, and strength—which is why hitting the mat can be so beneficial to feeling younger! If you’re daunted by the idea of twisting yourself into a pretzel when you have a hard enough time touching your toes, don’t worry. There’s a yoga practice for every level of experience—and you can even get started right in your own living room.  If you have mobility limitations, many instructors will be able to work with you to modify poses to your abilities in a classroom setting. You can also find some modified instructions online.

Mind Your Nutrition

We are what we eat. Or rather, what we eat can have a huge impact on our overall health, and the way we feel on a daily basis. As we age, we face unique health challenges, such as bone loss, but incorporating calcium into our diets (with adequate vitamin D3) on a regular basis can help keep bones strong. Try starting the day with a breakfast of yogurt paired with a fruit like blueberries, which are high in cell-protecting antioxidants. However, nutrition goes beyond food alone. Did you know that oftentimes feelings of mild fatigue or headaches are simple dehydration? Make it a goal to consume about eight eight-ounce glasses, roughly two liters, per day. And don’t forget to support your diet with supplements like a daily multivitamin with cellular support.

Be Social

When we talk about health, we often focus on the body and what we can do to stay physically healthy. But staying emotionally healthy is equally important! In fact, studies suggest that loneliness can be an important predictor of aging. Make a point to foster the important relationships in your life and set aside time to meet up with friends and family. If you can’t be with them physically, make a date to catch up via phone or video chat. Nothing will make you feel quite as young as watching a kids’ movie with a young family member or introducing them to a classic from your own childhood!

Laugh

While you’re socializing, make sure to whip out a few good jokes! Laughter has been proven to have health benefits, especially for older adults. It can boost blood vessel function, relieve tension and stress, and increase your happiness overall. It also has emotional benefits, bolstering social bonds and increasing social support between individuals. We all love to share a good laugh! Now, in addition to the sheer joy of a good chuckle, you can take heart in the fact that cracking up is good for your health.

Learn Something New

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. They’re wrong. Learning is a lifelong process, and it’s never too late to pick up a new skill or study something you’ve always been curious about. In fact, learning is great mental exercise, and continuous lifelong learning has been shown to increase cognitive function. There’s never been a better time to learn a new language, audit that Shakespeare class at your local university, or finally learn how to bake French pastries. Whatever it is you’ve always wanted to learn, dive in!

Turn on the Stereo

Learning isn’t the only way to exercise your brain—something as simple as turning on your favorite record can give your brain a boost as well! According to a Johns Hopkins otolaryngologist, “Music is structural, mathematical and architectural. It’s based on relationships between one note and the next. You may not be aware of it, but your brain has to do a lot of computing to make sense of it.” The health benefits of listening to music are numerous: reduced anxiety and pain, as well as increases in quality of sleep, memory, mental alertness and mood. It can even temporarily lower blood pressure, or, in the case of music from your younger years, help trigger memory recall.

Be Positive

Last, but definitely not least: look on the bright side! Research has shown that people who have a positive outlook tend to live longer. In fact, keeping a positive attitude about aging can result in a greater likelihood of living past age 85, and an 11-15% longer lifespan overall. Those who make positivity a priority also tend to experience less stress, which leads to a lower likelihood of stress-induced ailments.

Incorporating these nine tips into your life can help you to live a longer, fuller life!

The study’s author, Michael Snyder, a professor and the chair of genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine, stated: “People are aging at different rates, but what’s equally or even more important is where you see they’re aging differently.”

According to the research cited in the article, most of us fall into one of four ageotypes based on immune, liver, metabolic, or kidney influences.

While this is a good start, I believe that it is entirely likely that there are more than four ways to age. I would add to the list cardiovascular aging, brain aging, and especially energy aging, which involves our mitochondria—the little batteries inside each cell that provide over 90% of our cellular energy needs. Mitochondria are involved in many cellular responses including cell death, when cells cease to be able to carry out the functions necessary to maintain their viability and eventually disintegrate.

The research into ageotypes is relatively new. Eventually, we may have the information to tell individuals where they stand on particular pathways of aging. This could help in motivating them to change their lifestyle habits, such as diet, supplements, and exercise. The motivation to stay young and delay aging is strong, and most people would likely be open to learning more about their specific ageotype ages—or, more importantly, what they can do to slow that aging as much as possible. Whether they would actually put that information into practice and make the lifestyle changes necessary to optimize their aging process—and stick with them in the long run—remains to be seen.

We can’t entirely stop the aging process—the Fountain of Youth has yet to be found!—but there are things that we can do to keep ourselves feeling more youthful and being more active as we get on in years. For example, establishing a regular physical fitness routine and sticking with it can go a long way toward protecting our cardiovascular function and helping us to feel more energetic.

Nutritional Therapeutics (the company behind NTFactor® and NTFactor® Lipids) is very interested in helping people understand what they can do to help reduce their rate of aging.  Taking the appropriate food supplements can help restore cellular energy in aged individuals, as has been found in clinical trials.  In one published trial of older participants (of average age approximately 70), both men and women benefited from taking NTFactor Lipids®. In fact, their mitochondrial function improved to levels found in 30-year-olds! This was accompanied by increased vitality, cognition and other characteristics, as well as reductions in fatigue.

Although there are no panaceas when it comes to aging, we can use the insights gleaned from research such as that discussed above to fine-tune the ways we work to slow or reduce the effects of the aging process, or even regain some of the functional capabilities that have declined with age. With these efforts, we can lead more vital, productive lives as we age naturally.

Prof. Emeritus Garth Nicolson, PhD, MD (H) 
The Institute for Molecular Medicine, 
Huntington Beach, California 

References

Nicolson GL, Breeding PC. Settineri R, Ferreira de Mattos G.  Aging and chronic illnesses: Membrane Lipid Replacement for restoring mitochondrial function and reducing fatigue, pain, and other symptoms in aged individuals. Bioactive Compounds in Health & Disease 2020; 3(10): 194-203.
https://doi.org/10.31989/bchd.v3i10.749

Nicolson GL, Ferreira de Mattos G, Settineri R, Breeding PC. Membrane Lipid Replacement and its role in restoring mitochondrial membrane function and reducing symptoms in aging and age-related clinical conditions.  Nature Cell Science 2024; 2(4): 238-256.
https://doi.org/10.61474/ncs.2024.00038

As I explained previously, mitochondria supply over 90% of brain cell energy, so it’s easy to see why these little cellular organelles are so important to brain health. Our brain needs nutrients and oxygen to perform their vital functions, including providing high-energy molecules to nerve cells, maintaining calcium balance inside our cells, and important immune functions and other maintenance operations. If nerve cell mitochondria are damaged or cannot receive the necessary nutrients and oxygen, then all of the biological functions that involve the nervous system are impaired. This is especially important in brain health and aging.

Our mitochondria sustain damage over time, and as we enter into the later stages of our lives those damaged mitochondria can no longer provide the energy necessary to maintain memory, cognition and brain health compared to mitochondria at younger stages of our lives. This degradation of mitochondria can occur at different ages in different individuals, but in general, a 90-year-old person may have lost up to one-half of the mitochondrial function that they had as a young adult! This means that the brains of older people can tire more easily and not be as able to maintain normal brain function, resulting in temporary confusion, memory loss, and other problems. Exercise can help with this, because it stimulates the movement of oxygen and nutrients to the brain and ultimately to nerve cells in the brain, but exercise alone cannot make an old brain young again.

To heal this age-related damage takes more than a brisk walk or the right food on your plate. But to understand why, you need to know a little bit more about the structure of mitochondria, and why it is important to routinely replace important parts of this structure to maintain mitochondrial function.

Mitochondria are separated from the other parts of our cells by a surrounding outer membrane. This membrane forms a barrier with the interior of the cell (or cytoplasm) to keep nutrients inside and separate the energy-generating system found in an additional membrane system called the inner mitochondrial membrane from the rest of the cell. Basic research over the last approximately 50 years has found that the inner mitochondrial membranes are the critical structures in generating the high-energy molecules necessary to maintain brain function. This system must remain undamaged to maintain the electrical/chemical gradient across the inner mitochondrial membrane, which is essential to produce the high-energy molecules that drive so many important cellular processes.

As we age, we suffer damage from highly reactive molecules called free radicals that are derived from mitochondria themselves and from other sources, and especially the mitochondrial inner membranes (MIM). The MIM, as well as other intracellular membranes and even our genetic code (DNA), can become damaged with age due to free radical action. Among the most damage-sensitive molecules in our cells are the phospholipids in all of our membranes that naturally form a bilayer structure that is the matrix of the MIM and all other membranes of cells in our bodies. The damaged membrane phospholipids, especially those in our MIMs, must be replaced continually to maintain the fluidity, structural integrity and activities of the membrane proteins as well as maintaining the trans-membrane electrical/chemical gradient across the MIM. This is why proper nutrition for our mitochondria is so important during aging and in order to maintain our health.

What is the solution? Provide undamaged, essential nutritional membrane phospholipids in our diets or as nutritional supplements so that as we age our mitochondrial membranes, especially the MIM, can be repaired and can maintain their proper functions. It sounds simple enough, but unfortunately those membrane phospholipids are themselves very sensitive to environmental damage, so many of the membrane phospholipids that we would obtain in our normal diets are already damaged by the time that they arrive in our brain. Since most diets and nutritional supplements cannot provide some of the essential membrane phospholipids as undamaged molecules, so the process of replacing damaged membrane molecules by diet alone can’t occur at rates necessary to maintain brain mitochondrial function at peak performance levels.

At NTI, we have developed a proprietary nutritional or food supplement that provides just the correct mixture of protected, essential mitochondrial membrane phospholipids to help repair the damage to mitochondria that occurs during aging and with health problems. This all-natural supplement is called NTFactor® Lipids, and it forms the basis of almost all of the NTI products. Best of all, it has been matched to the MIM composition, and it is protected from the damage during storage and ingestion that occurs because of the harmful effects of oxidation.

I take this product daily myself, because I believe in its effectiveness in helping older folks like me to improve their brain health as well as their general health. I don’t think that there is anything better that you can do for your brain health than eating properly, getting enough exercise, stimulating your brain, staying social, and taking daily vitamins and a mitochondrial nutritional supplement like NTFactor® Lipids. In my next update, I will discuss some other important reasons to take daily a Membrane Lipid Replacement supplement like NTFactor® Lipids.

Prof. Emeritus Garth Nicolson, PhD, MD (H)
The Institute for Molecular Medicine
Huntington Beach, California

References

Nicolson GL. Membrane Lipid Replacement—a functional approach to repairing cellular membranes, reducing symptoms,  and restoring function.  Functional Food Science 2022; 2(8): 198-204.
https://doi.org/10.31989/ffs.v2i8.990

Nicolson GL, Ferreira de Mattos G, Settineri R, Breeding PC. Membrane Lipid Replacement and its role in restoring mitochondrial membrane function and reducing symptoms in aging and age-related clinical conditions.  Nature Cell Science 2024; 2(4): 238-256.
https://doi.org/10.61474/ncs.2024.00038

If you’re daunted by the idea of being an octogenarian marathon runner, let me reassure you that while it’s important to stay active as we age, we don’t necessarily need to maintain the same level we did as young adults.  Even a brisk nightly walk around the neighborhood can do a lot of good in our later years. The important thing to remember is that if we don’t maintain some level of physical activity, we can accelerate the aging process. Physical activity stimulates and increases blood flow into the brain, which is important in maintaining cognition and memory.

Of course, if we maintain physical activity as we age, we also need time to rest and recover.  In fact, we actually need that rest more than when we were younger. While we may not necessarily need more rest time, we need to make sure that we are getting enough rest to completely recover from various activities. No more skipping our recovery time and hoping we can just muscle through it—leave that invincible attitude for the young!

A recent article in the Cleveland Jewish News, “Keeping brain healthy important as seniors age”, shared opinions from numerous professionals in age-related fields on additional actions we can take to improve brain health and prevent some of the decline in brain function as we get older. One important factor? Socializing!

Maintaining social contacts and interactions stimulate our brain networks, and keeping active inter-personal interactions and exercising our brains keeps our nervous system functioning at a high level.  This can be as simple as playing cards with friends or even reading a book for the first time.  

In the above mentioned article, Silvia Orsulic-Jeras, a senior research associate and SHARE program manager at the Benjamin Rose Institute on Aging in Cleveland, urges, “It is so important for families to remember to keep their older loved one socialized through interactions. A lot of what happens is people stop asking their older loved ones what they like to do. Learn more about their interests and their life story, spend time with them doing what they love and value.”

Of course, nutrition is also important in aging and especially for brain health.   Nerve cells are the basic building blocks in our nervous systems, and have a much higher rate of metabolism than other cells in our body. They are also much more sensitive to toxic molecules that find their way into the brain. This means that brain nerve cells need much more energy than cells in other tissues in order to function, and they need more protection than other cells and organs from toxins.  They get this energy primarily from the little ‘batteries’ inside each cell called mitochondria, and mitochondria are also important in the removal of toxic molecules in the brain.

Mitochondria supply over 90% of brain cell energy, so it’s easy to see why these little cellular organelles are so important to brain health.  Nerve cells in our brain need nutrients and oxygen to perform their vital functions, including providing high-energy molecules to nerve cells, maintaining calcium balance inside our cells, and important immune functions and other maintenance operations.  If nerve cell mitochondria are damaged or cannot receive the necessary nutrients and oxygen, then all of the biological functions that involve the nervous system are impaired.  

In my next update, I’ll tell you more about the impact this damage can have, and what you can do to help mitigate it by adding to your diet important natural membrane molecules that are already inside your cells, and especially inside your mitochondria!  What are these natural membrane molecules?  One class of the essential membrane molecules inside mitochondria are the membrane phospholipids that compose the matrix of all biological membranes, and this essential class of membrane molecules forms the basis of important natural supplements for your brain like NTFactor^® Lipids. The membrane lipids in NTFactor^® Lipids are essential to maintaining mitochondrial function, and these lipids must be routinely replaced. My next update will go into more detail how NTFactor® Lipids can help maintain your brain and especially your brain mitochondria.

Prof. Emeritus Garth Nicolson, PhD, MD (H)
The Institute for Molecular Medicine
Huntington Beach, California

References

Nicolson GL. Membrane Lipid Replacement—a functional approach to repairing cellular membranes, reducing symptoms, and restoring function.  Functional Food Science 2022; 2(8): 198-204. 
https://doi.org/10.31989/ffs.v2i8.990

Nicolson GL, Ferreira de Mattos G, Settineri R, Breeding PC. Membrane Lipid Replacement and its role in restoring mitochondrial membrane function and reducing symptoms in aging and age-related clinical conditions.  Nature Cell Science 2024; 2(4): 238-256.
https://doi.org/10.61474/ncs.2024.00038