WE HAVE THE ANATOMY OF A COMMITTED HERBIVORE

h/t to that internet maven, property rights champion, Robert Wenzel.  

As an African-American physician focusing on preventive medicine, Dr. Mills has delved into some of the environmental and societal influences affecting the health of African Americans and other racial/ethnic minorities. Dr. Mills has lectured and given research seminars across the United States and in Mexico and Canada on such topics as the negative impacts of meat and dairy consumption on human health, nutrition and HIV/AIDS, nutrition and cancer, and the dietary needs of various ethnic groups.  

He answers the question that if we don't get our protein from animal sources, where do we get our protein?  And he's right that you get your protein from plants and vegetables.  In fact, your body does a better job of distributing plant protein throughout your body than it does with animal protein.  And the reason for that is that animal protein is like a blast or overwhelming infusion of protein, whereas with plant protein your body takes and converts what it needs.  When we're young we can handle animal protein; hell, we prefer it.  We're active, running around, jumping around, playing sports, and so forth, so an immediate repair with a burger or steak or any animal protein is perfect . . . when we're young.  I would still advocate for eggs.  The terrific fat that you get from eggs is an excellent energy source.  The diseases that Dr. Mills mentions--cancer, diabetes, and so forth--are all conditions that people get with age. Those are age-related diseases.  So if you've been eating meat most of your life, you may want to consider incorporating blood-letting in your routine or add the iron and heavy mineral chelator, IP6, to your diet.  You, in fact, consume that between meals.  You will feel better.  But moving to fruits and vegetables is a healthier way.  Your energy will rise.  Your health with improve.  Your performance and productivity will find its rhythm again.  

BAKING SODA TREATS INFLAMMATORY NERVE PAIN

A review of Bill Sardi's "The Baking Soda Cure for Almost Everything," Aprile 27, 2018 @ LewRockwell.com.

I first took baking soda as a muscle relaxant.  Yeah.  After running about three miles one night, my knees were particularly sore.  A few weeks prior to this, a nurse friend of mine told me of the virtues of baking soda as a remedy for arthritis, including pain in the joints.  The knee is a joint, so I thought "Ah, what the heck."  So I took 1 tablespoon and voila, pain-free, almost immediately.  I was shocked.  In fact, so much of the pain was gone that I actually felt not just pain-free but I felt pretty good all around.  My knees were no longer sore.  My calves and thighs were relaxed.  I was impressed with the results.  The friend told me that you can only tolerate about 1 teaspoon per week.  Okay.  Didn't understand why the limit, but okay I live with that. 

And then a few weeks back, I come across this article by Bill Sardi, titled "The Baking Soda Cure for Almost Everything," April 27, 2018, at Lew Rockwell.com.  Well, that's a hell of a title.  And knowing how accurate and thorough Sardi tends to be, I knew that I had to read his piece and its linked resources carefully.  

He opens with savvy financial recommendation:

The three trillion-dollar income stream produced by the medical industrial complex is about to come demolished by a home remedy–baking soda.  Buy stock in Arm & Hammer. (Church & Dwight Co. Ltd.)

I will definitely look into it.  But before I go out and buy, let's review the specifics of his recommendations.  The focus of the benefits are found on the surface of the spleen.  

Now for the details:

Researchers at the Medical College of Georgia have discovered a nerve center in a cell layer in the spleen that controls the immune response and therefore inflammation throughout the body.  Given that virtually all chronic age-related disease involves inflammation (called inflammaging), this discovery is of monumental significance and has widespread application for virtually every organ and tissue in the body as the spleen is not only an abdominal organ that is involved in the recycling of old blood cells but is also a key part of the human immune system.

HOW MUCH DO I TAKE? 1/2 TEASPOON PER DAY FOR 2 WEEKS

What is astounding is the amount that one needs to maintain the immune response: 1/2 teaspoon per day for 2 weeks.  Do you know what that would cost?  The water costs more.  

The striking part of this discovery is that autoimmune reactions responsible for chronic inflammation throughout the body were quelled by consumption of two grams (~half a teaspoon) of baking soda in water for two weeks in healthy humans.  Researchers say baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) calms the immune response in the spleen and has a system-wide effect.

How, er, why does sodium bicarbonate work? 

An over-active immune response defines autoimmune disorders experienced in physically remote parts of the body including the eyes, kidneys, brain, joints, arteries, and lungs as well as in obesity.

As researchers explain, when sodium bicarbonate is consumed it becomes a trigger for the stomach to make more acid to digest the next meal and for the overlooked mesothelial cell lining in the spleen to signal there is no need to mount an overly protective immune response that can alter a delicate balance between M1 and M2 macrophages, white blood cells that target bacteria, viruses, parasites and tumor cells.

Credit: Cumberlands University Biology

It looks like the reason why baking soda works at all is due to the presence of the spleen and its mesothelial cells that line it.  Remove the spleen from the body in some kind of operation, and the benefits of baking soda evaporate.

Mesothelial cells line the spleen and directly secrete the nerve chemical acetylcholine.  When the spleen is removed from lab animals or just slightly disturbed, the mesothelial nervous connection in the spleen with other parts of the body was cut off and the healthy effect produced by baking soda was abolished.  Acetylcholine signaling represents the brakes on the human immune response.  Acetylcholine signals other organs to under-respond when confronted with pathogenic germs or tumor cells.

What's nice about this is that simply using an oral dosage diluted in water works.  You don't need a limousine IV drip of baking soda to realize any of the benefits.  How this news can be anything less than fantastic is beyond me.

“This is the first demonstration that orally ingested sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) can promote a powerful anti-inflammatory response in both animals and humans,” say researchers writing in the Journal of Immunology.  Baking soda “may provide a cheap, relatively safe, effective and easily accessible and/or noninvasive method to activate anti-inflammatory nerve pathways,” researchers emphasized.

Did you get that?  You're looking at a compound that treats inflammatory nerve pain or stress.  

Macrophages traverse the entire circulatory system.  But macrophages that reside in the digestive tract represent the largest population of macrophages in the human body.  This strategic location positions them as a first-line defense against harmful bacteria and other pathogens.

Imagine the widespread universal application of this simple remedy in the human body.  If only Big Pharma could have patented it.The polarization of one type of macrophage (M1) over the other (M2) is considered the key link between inflammation and many diseases.  For example, obesity greatly increases the numbers of M1 macrophages in fatty tissue.  This can result in insulin resistance (inability of cells to utilize insulin to produce energy).

Got poor vision?  Then consume the baking soda. 

A giant pillar of modern medicine against age-related disease is about to fall to baking soda therapy.  Monoclonal antibody drugs that block the cellular target of inflammatory agents represent $90 billion in annual sales.  Such drugs are commonly used to treat an advanced form of macular degeneration.  M1/M2 macrophage balance is the tipping point between a common and severe form of macular degeneration, a disease that robs older adults of their central vision.

Don't want to take the baking soda? Then try Resveratrol.

The red wine molecule resveratrol also addresses macrophage M1/M2 polarization, which makes it another excellent natural remedy for chronic inflammation as well.  This is why resveratrol supplementation has been demonstrated to rescue patients who don’t respond to monoclonal antibody drug injections.

Where do we go from here?  Are doctors going to drop their prescription pads and hand out samples of sodium bicarbonate?  That’s not likely.   Let’s see how modern medicine throws this sure-fire remedy under the rug this time.

HEROIC: NON-LICENSED DOCTOR SAVED THOUSANDS OF INFANTS AND CHANGED MEDICAL HISTORY

By Larry Getlen @ The New York Post

Martin Couney shows off one of his rescued babies, Beth Allen.  Find that baby, now an adult, pictured below.

When Marion Conlin gave birth to twins earlier than expected in a Brooklyn hospital in May 1920, one of her babies was already dead. Her doctor bluntly told the woman and her husband, Woolsey, “Don’t rush to bury that one, because you will need to bury the other one too . . . She’s not going to live the day.”

But Woolsey was not giving up on the other so easily.

The couple had honeymooned the previous year in Atlantic City, and Woolsey recalled a sideshow exhibit featuring prematurely born babies whose lives were saved right there on the Boardwalk. Resting in new machines called incubators, the babies made medical history while serving as a prime attraction for gawking tourists.

Woolsey also remembered hearing that the same doctor had set up a similar exhibit in Coney Island. So while their own doctor tried to convince them that all was lost, Woolsey grabbed his 2-pound daughter, ran from the hospital and hailed a cab, hoping the Coney Island sideshow could save her life.

A new book, The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies, by Dawn Raffel (Blue Rider Press), tells the story of Martin Couney, a self-appointed “doctor”—his credentials turned out to be nonexistent—who nonetheless saved thousands of infants, and introduced incubators to the modern world.

What little is known about Martin Couney is that he was born in Prussia in 1869 as Michael Cohn and changed his name after immigrating to New York at 18.

He does not appear to have had any medical credentials, and while he often claimed to be a protege of the world-renowned French doctor Pierre-Constant Budin, who popularized incubators in Europe, there is no evidence for this claim.

What is true is that whatever his motive, he spent 40 years as the only medical hope for parents of babies born too early in New York City and beyond. Raffel estimates he saved between 6,500 and 7,000 lives.

Incubators were invented in Europe in the late 19th century, the evolution of innovations from Russia, Germany and France. Couney claimed that in 1896, Budin, an actual pioneer in the field, sent him to display incubators at the Great Industrial Exhibition of Berlin. Rather than stand next to empty machines, Couney, referring to the displays as “child hatchery,” said he realized how much more effective it would be if they housed actual babies being saved for the public to see.

The truth about where Couney first encountered these machines, and his motivation for making them the great cause of his life, is unknown. Raffel believes he did not attend the 1896 exhibition at all, but heard about it, and became associated with the machines soon after.

“The exhibition in Berlin made a big splash,” Raffel says. “It was written up in newspapers all over the place, including the United States, and showmen started becoming interested in it.”

However it began, Couney toured the machines around America and established a show in Coney Island in 1903, one block away from the Luna Park amusement park.

The exhibit ran in that general area for the next 40 years. Visitors were charged a quarter to view the babies, and the money went to their care.

As one might expect, people didn’t know what to make of the exhibit at first.

Beth Allen today.  She was one of the babies Martin Couney rescued.  

A reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper, in a story headlined “Strangest Place on Earth for Human Tots to be Fed, Nursed and Cared For,” wrote that the idea of “haranguing the passing throng in an effort to divert its shekels for a spectacle so serious, not to say sacred, strikes one as questionable, almost repellent.” But by the end of the piece, the author’s impression had turned positive, praising the care the children received.

Couney hired barkers to stand outside the exhibit and attract customers, screaming slogans like, “Don’t forget to see the babies!” In 1922, one of his barkers was a young British actor named Archibald Leach, who later changed his name to Cary Grant.

Couney himself developed into quite the showman, hamming it up for the press and the crowds.

“Every blistering, footsore day, he would station himself at the door to his show — ‘All the world loves a baby! Once seen, never forgotten!’ ” Raffel writes. “He never got tired of talking to the public, not even the Dummkopfs who deduced he’d made the little critters. (‘Hiya, Doc, where’dja get the eggs?’) Sometimes they wanted to order one fresh for themselves.”

But for all his showbiz, Couney was in the lifesaving business, and he took it seriously. The exhibit was immaculate. When new children arrived, dropped off by panicked parents who knew Couney could help them where hospitals could not, they were immediately bathed, rubbed with alcohol and swaddled tight, then “placed in an incubator kept at 96 or so degrees, depending on the patient. Every two hours, those who could suckle were carried upstairs on a tiny elevator and fed by breast by wet nurses who lived in the building. The rest [were fed by] a funneled spoon.”

A photograph of an incubator at Dr. Martin Couney’s Coney Island incubator sideshow.

Even the nurses — whose genuine medical degrees helped make up for the absence of Couney’s in instances such as signing death certificates — understood that maintaining the show business of it all was key to keeping the operation alive. They would often feed or bathe the babies where people could watch, and one nurse would “flash a diamond ring and slip it over an infant’s wrist, all the way up its skinny arm, to demonstrate scale.”

While Couney couldn’t save every baby, Raffel writes that “most of the patients went home in a couple of months.” It’s unverified since Couney never published anything or left any records of his work, but he claimed an 85 percent survival rate, once saying most deaths occurred within 24 to 48 hours of his receiving a baby.

“If we have a child for seven days in our charge,” he said, “we never lose it.”

Despite Couney’s success, there were numerous ways this type of endeavor could lead to tragedy. When St. Louis planned their 1904 World’s Fair, they decided they wanted an incubator exhibit, but not Couney.

They contracted the lowest bidder, a doctor named Joseph Hardy who “was fully licensed and apparently utterly ignorant of how to care for a preemie.” After the exhibit had been open for a bit, a Humane Society examination found that out of 43 children cared for, 39 had died. Couney published an open letter in the New York Evening Journal calling it “the crime of the decade” and claiming Hardy and his staff “did not know the difference between an incubator and a peanut roaster.” While changes were made, including hiring a new doctor, the exhibit stayed open.

In time, Couney offered genuine evidence of his success. He held reunions, inviting children who been saved in his incubators. In 1909 in Chicago, he even held a “best preemie” competition.

“That Sunday morning, the children were brought in dressed in their finest attire,” Raffel writes. “Ruffles and ribbons, buttons and bows. Martin, fluent in baby talk as any other tongue, was having the time of his life.”

The winner, a 3-year-old named Burton who was judged the “healthiest, handsomest, and best-developed,” was awarded a little red wagon.

Sometimes, his successes came to him. At the 1939 World’s Fair, he was approached by a 19-year-old woman who said she was one of the babies he had saved. Her name was Lucille Conlin. She was Marion and Woolsey Conlin’s surviving daughter. She went on to become a nurse.

Throughout his decades of saving babies, Couney understood there were better options. He tried to sell, or even donate, his incubators to hospitals, but they didn’t want them. He even offered all his incubators to the city of New York in 1940 but was turned down.

Raffel offers several possible reasons for this. The difficulty of operating the machines was one.

“Doctors didn’t have the resources or trained personnel to use [incubators] properly,” she says. “An incubator is a labor-intensive process. You had to have specially trained nurses and a low nurse-to-patient ratio. It was too much work for them.”

Given the popularity of eugenics in the US at the time, there also wasn’t much sympathy for these children.

“You had a raging climate of eugenics which did not directly target preemies, but did directly target children who had severe disabilities,” Raffel says. “It was an environment where we only wanted to produce the fittest babies. That was a very strong cultural undercurrent. People just felt like these children were not worth saving.”

Couney died in 1950 at age 80. That he had closed his exhibit only seven years prior is a testament both to his dedication to helping children, and the failure of the medical establishment to take on the crucial job of saving their lives.

“In 1943, Cornell New York Hospital opened the city’s first dedicated premature infant station,” Raffel writes. “That same year, Dr. Martin Couney closed his show for the final time. He said his work was done.”  

Martin Couney's Coney Island Exhibit was reviewed in The Atlantic back in 2015.

h/t Robert Wenzel @ EconomicPolicyJournal, "Screw Government Licenses: The Non-Licensed Fake Doctor Who Saved Thousands of Babies That Hospitals Couldn't."

ANY AMOUNT OF COFFEE IN YOUR DAY STAVES OFF MORBIDITY

I know you love the taste of coffee.  If it's not the taste, then it's the memories, and to be more specific, it is the times that you drink or the people you've shared a cup with that you quietly and wordlessly enjoy the aroma, the warmth, and that special memory.  Few things in the world can produce such an effect.  But know, too, that coffee is a diuretic.  What that means is that you're going eliminate fluids from your body, fluids that contain certain health-preserving nutrients.  So it's a trade-off.  Aren't most things? 

O, Headlines!

CNBC: “Drinking as many as eight cups of coffee a day could help you live longer, study says”

Time:  “Drinking Coffee May Help You Live Longer, Study Says”

Boston Globe: “Drinking Up to 8 Cups of Coffee Per Day Might Help You Live Longer, Study Says”

South China Morning Post: “Coffee May Help You Live Longer, Even If You Drink Eight Cups a Day, New Study Shows”

Science Alert: “8 Coffees a Day Means a Longer Life Than No Coffee, According to a 10-Year Study”

The burst of reports on the benefits of coffee feels more like a campaign than a newsworthy news story.  First, they’re not health reports.  Without a context, the headlines, like all headlines, are fantastic.  They are slogans in a campaign, like “Drink coffee, live longer.”  Or “Cups of Coffee helps you live longer.”  So coffee is slowly but consistently being pitched as a health or age-defying concoction with the added benefit of a caffeine jolt that restores you to youthful energies.  The coffee industry is hopped up on its own product.  It’s salesmanship not on caffeine but on steroids.  And we’ve even heard from Dave Asprey, the Bulletproof Coffee guru.  I have no doubt that if you add fat—butter or coconut oil—to your coffee that you will feel a bigger and longer-lasting boost of energy than if you drank just a cup of black coffee.  So a new report was published by the The reporting is bad that to get to the truth of what the conclusions to the actual study said is like stepping through a minefield.  Here are the findings reported at JAMA, the Journal of American Medical Association: 

Findings  This large prospective cohort study of a half million people found inverse associations for coffee drinking with mortality, including among participants drinking 1 up to 8 or more cups per day. No differences were observed in analyses that were stratified by genetic polymorphisms affecting caffeine metabolism.

The headlines above poorly represent the details of the findings in the British study.  You need to drink 8 cups of coffee to get the benefits.  Any amount of coffee per day staves off morbidity regardless of if a person metabolizes coffee quickly or slowly.  The states that participants consumed a range of coffee from 1 to 8 cups.  So any amount of coffee that you drink each day has protective effects against morbidity.  Morbidity is illness or near-death disease.  So all that the study shows is that coffee keeps a diseased person alive longer.  So in this light, coffee is beneficial.  It gives people with states of morbidity more time.  

Conclusions and Relevance  Coffee drinking was inversely associated with mortality, including among those drinking 8 or more cups per day and those with genetic polymorphisms indicating slower or faster caffeine metabolism. These findings suggest the importance of noncaffeine constituents in the coffee-mortality association and provide further reassurance that coffee drinking can be a part of a healthy diet.

Put in this context, coffee is not the elixir that the industry is trying to make it out to be.  The anti-aging and health market is booming and it is lucrative.  Have you seen the prices of some of these high-end products?  Try finding a boutique, quality vitamin for under $50; hell, under $100.  So by positioning itself as a healthful elixir, the coffee industry is sure to gain an increase in market share of the health and health food industry.  

The article at MSNBC starts like this.  

Drinking coffee could boost your chances of a longer life, research shows, even for those who consume as many as eight cups a day. 

Note the reference to excessive coffee drinking.  Why are 8 cups a health hazard for some, while drinking a few cups evidently healthy?  Long-term coffee consumption lowers the risk of death.

In a study of around half-a-million British adults, coffee drinkers were found to have a slightly lower risk of death over a 10-year follow-up period than non-coffee drinkers.

And it doesn't matter the form of coffee, whether it's instant or brewed ground coffee.  The interesting part of the study that I liked was that benefits were experienced in folks with metabolic problems.  That's kind of powerful news.  

The apparent longevity boost comes as yet another piece of good news for coffee lovers, with health benefits recorded in drinkers of instant, ground and decaffeinated coffee. The study is also the first of its kind to suggest health benefits in people with so-called genetic glitches affecting how their bodies react to caffeine.

My one concern and one that is even noted by the study is that coffee is not the health elixir that it's being reported as.  Yes, it contains anti-oxidants.  And, yes, as a diuretic it can help to leach excessive, unbound iron in your blood.  But as a diuretic, it not only leaches unbound iron, which is a healthy function particularly in men over 40, but it also leaches vitamins B, C, and others.  If one is a regular coffee drinker, it is important to take magnesium, for coffee hardens blood vessels; the magnesium helps to relax them.  So coffee can block the metabolism of certain foods and vitamins.  Coffee is a chelator.  So if someone wants to rid themselves of excess unbound iron, coffee is not a bad way to go.  But know, too, that you'll be interfering with nutrient absorption from foods and vitamins.  

Health experts warned people should not start drinking coffee, or increasing their intake, for medical reasons. They also warned too much coffee for women during pregnancy could be harmful.

Personally, I don't trust all of the government-sponsored health organizations, like JAMA or NCI, the American Cancer Society, and others.  It's always better to go with folks who are immersed in health supplements and very specific, highly targeted nutritional compounds to treat specific conditions.  You can do your own reading and should.  Your productive life is at stake.  Plus, there is so little accountability from doctors, so their incentive to do a good, professional job.  Take your health into your own hands.  

HEALTH BENEFITS

Researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) used data from people taking part in a genetic study called the U.K. Biobank. The participants of that study volunteered to give blood and answer detailed health and lifestyle questions.

For the latest study, published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Internal Medicine, NCI researchers analyzed information provided by approximately 500,000 people, who answered questions about coffee consumption, smoking and drinking habits, medical history and more. 

If you're going to drink coffee, you'll need to take nutritional supplements, all of them--A, B, C, D, E, and minerals like zinc, magnesium, and a little calcium.  The reason is that coffee leaches nutrients, so be forewarned.  Bill Sardi explains this process:  

The problem of thiamin deficiency may be traced to another daily practice, the consumption of coffee, tea or beer. Many millions of people consume coffee or tea at the same time they take their morning multivitamin. What's the problem with tea or coffee? They contain tannins (bitter parts) that alter vitamin B1 and render it useless. Sulfite preservatives, as found in wine, are another antagonist to B1. Alcohol also interferes with B1 absorption. In fact, about 30-80% of alcohol users have low circulating levels of B1. The lesson here is not to take vitamin B1 pills with coffee, tea or alcohol. 

Another author, SFGate, argues the same point. 

Coffee, tea, cola and other caffeine-containing drinks and foods have a mildly diuretic effect on your body. Moderate consumption of caffeine should present no problem for people with well-balanced diets that supply all the nutrients their bodies need to function properly. However, because B vitamins are water soluble and are flushed out of the body through excretion, heavy caffeine users may need to supplement with B-complex vitamins to compensate for nutrients lost through diuresis. Naturopathic doctor Linda Page, author of “Healthy Healing,” says excessive caffeine consumption hits your body’s stores of thiamine particularly hard. 

Preceding those remarks, the SFGate author explains that 

B vitamins play a key role in converting the foods you eat into energy, but unhealthy diet choices, too much stress and certain drugs can rob you of their vital benefits. Although they are available in wide array of animal- and plant-based foods, B vitamins are water soluble and cannot be stored in body tissue. As a consequence, you must renew your supply each day and avoid the forces that can rapidly deplete them from your body. 

A poor diet AND caffeine strip your body of these important nutrients.  So you'll want to ask yourself, how can coffee, a diuretic that leaches key nutrients from your body also extend life?  

CALORIE-RESTRICTED DIET . . . DOUBLES THE LIFESPAN AND HEALTHSPAN

Hope springs eternal.

The Washington Times reports that scientists were able to reverse the graying of hair on mice and smooth the wrinkles of the same critter.  And with this result, it is advanced that the treatment will work on humans.  Maybe.  Good luck bringing this to market.  

Science has made mice look good by reversing age-related wrinkles and hair loss at the genetic level. Humanity could get a similar make-over in the future.

They introduced a specific gene mutation on a test mouse, which prompted a change in profound appearance. Within four weeks, the mouse had developed wrinkled skin and extensive, visible hair loss. When regular function was restored within the gene by turning off the culprit mutation, the mouse returned to a previous life of smooth skin and luxurious fur only two months later — deemed “indistinguishable” from a healthy mouse of the same age.

“To our knowledge, this observation is unprecedented,” said Keshav Singh, a professor of genetics who led the study.

“This mouse model should provide an unprecedented opportunity for the development of preventive and therapeutic drug development strategies to augment the mitochondrial functions for the treatment of aging-associated skin and hair pathology and other human diseases in which mitochondrial dysfunction plays a significant role,” Mr. Singh said in a statement.“

Wrinkled skin and hair loss are hallmarks of aging. What if they could be reversed?” asked researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham — who appear to have accomplished that feat, according to the research team. 

Oh, I see.  So what we've learned, then, is that to reverse aging one needs to repair the mitochondrial function.  But we already have that capability.  And for a little pushback on the study cited above, let it be known that the most important concern when it comes to reversing aging is not gene mutation, as was conducted in the experiment, but "rather the dynamic ability of genes to make proteins."

While gene mutations only account for ~2% of all disease, most chronic age-related disease doesn’t involve faults in gene structure but rather the dynamic ability of genes to make proteins (called gene expression or gene silencing) which is referred to as epigenetics.  

Sardi adds that

. . . inherited gene mutations may be inevitable and produce single-gene disorders such as cystic fibrosis, sickle cell, muscular dystrophy or Huntington’s disease.  But aging and its accompanying diseases (diabetes, arthritis, cancer, heart, brain and liver disease) are modifiable. 

I'll add two more points by Sardi on an anti-aging compound.

The diet, namely a calorie-restricted diet, practiced daily or intermittently, doubles the lifespan and healthspan [my emphasis] of lower forms of life (fruit flies, roundworms, and mice).  Or a molecular mimic (i.e. anti-aging pill) may target the same genes as food deprivation and provide a shortcut to allay the ravages of aging.   

. . .  

In other words, what would taken a lifetime to achieve in a laboratory mouse was exceeded by 9-fold in just 12 weeks.  Eighty-two percent (82%) of the same 832 longevity genes were switched in the same direction (on or off) as a limited calorie diet by the resveratrol matrix (Longevinex®), which is a commercially available nutraceutical.  That is the closest anyone has come to a molecular mimic of a calorie-restricted diet. 

But get Sardi's Longevinex.  It's one of the few Resveratrol products that's actually been tested.