“Man and man’s earth are unexhausted and undiscovered. Wake and listen! Verily, the earth shall yet be a source of recovery. Remain faithful to the earth, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The trend of  holistic ingredients in sleek, minimalistic packaging is quite imminent. I already perceived this tendency when I clicked through moonjuice’s online store (which I mentioned the post before) and various inspirational minimalism blogs. A prime example is black bottled water. The first time I encountered a picture of a bottle of BLK I really thought someone photoshopped it but in fact for about 4USD you can find it on Amazon. Why is the water black and what is its benefit?

The answer lies in the black humic minerals which are added to the water. Predominantly mentioned as the magic ingredient is Fulvic acid. BLK claims it ‘alkalizes’ the body and supplies it with electrolytes (click). Fulvic acid, next to humic acid, is one of two kinds of natural acidic organic polymers. Until now it cannot be easily synthesized and mostly it is being extracted out of organic matter like humus found in soil, sediment, or aquatic environments. Due to its chemical composition it has the ability to form strong complexes with metals like copper, iron, and aluminium (1, 2, 3) and is therefore a precursor of organic water pollutants that are considered harmful (see 1, 2, 3). Fulvic acid is also present in ancient alternative medicine: Sometimes called Shilajit, Mumijo, Mumie, black-tar or vegetable asphalt (I am sure there are many more names) is a black solid and it is considered to be a potent fortifier and adaptogen in e.g. ayurveda and traditional chinese medicine. Traditionally there are a mulititude of topical uses of Shilajit and it’s supposed to cure infected wounds and ease inflammations. I found four useful reviews supporting the ascribed effect (1, 2, 3, 4). Ingested it is said to be neuroprotective, cognition-enhancing and preventing Alzheimer’s disease (1, 2, 3, 4) and helpful against gastric infections (1, 2, 3, 4) and chronic fatigue syndrome (1, 2). If you think BLK is your only option of black water I listed some alternative brands on the right bar. There is still a lot of research required to figure how Fulvic Acid truly contributes to the human health and most studies you can find are very preliminary. Anyways, I’ll order a bottle just out of curiosity, Ea

today: Cerium, Yttrium und Neodymium

“There’s no such thing as ageing gracefully. I don’t meet people who want to get Alzheimer’s disease, or who want to get cancer or arthritis or any of the other things that afflict the elderly. Ageing is bad for you, and we better just actually accept that.” Aubrey de Grey

Oh, how nice it would be to live a little longer with the same pace and inquisitiveness but a youthful body! If you followed the past entries of my blog you know I am very curious about life extension research. Many care about their appearance and rather invest in anti-aging skincare than in nurturing supplements, but I start to get more and more the feeling that 2015 is going to be the year really where promising ‘longevity products’ will hit the shelves big time, either from botanical apothecaries (for holistic minds amongst us) or creations from a lab. Last week I came across two new ones: Into the Gloss just posted a link about (already sold out) Beauty Dust, a botanical apothecary version of an Anti-Aging Supplement (link) and MIT Technology Review‘s blog shared a link of Elysium, the longevity pill for 50USD/month (link). I leave it to your fantasy if Beauty dust with e.g. finely grounded pearls, Lo Han Guo and Rehmannia does anything supporting for your beauty and vitality (though I like the cute product design) but Elysium is probably one of the most promising longevity supplements so far. According to MIT Technology review Elysium comes with the nice backup of five Nobel Prize winners advising it including neuroscientist Eric Kandel, biologist Thomas Südhof, origin-of-life theorist Jack Szostak, and the 2013 laureate in chemistry Martin Karplus (read here).

But what is in the blue soft capsule that carries the name of the greek perception of the afterlife? 62-year old MIT biologist Leonard Guarente brought the Silicon Valley based startup to life and he is “convinced that the process of aging can be slowed by tweaking the body’s metabolism”. According to Guarente it’s not easy to prove the longevity effect on certain animal-test approved supplements in humans, too. So he takes the “unconventional route of packaging cutting-edge lab research as so-called nutraceuticals, which don’t require clinical trials or approval by the FDA” (read all here). Elysium’s only supplement so far is called ‘Base’ and has a supposedly potent mix of natural substances that can be found in blueberries (pterostilbene) and milk (nicotinamide riboside). They explain it as following: “it targets two critical components of human metabolism: the coenzyme nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) and a class of proteins known as sirtuins. It targets these specific biological components through a novel NAD+ precursor, known as nicotinamide riboside (NR), and a sirtuin activating polyphenol by the name of pterostilbene.”(read on here). Well, it is not very clear if Elysium will give you a little additional years, but you are for sure funding a promising life-extension research facility. Elysium is going to sales next week and if you want to be the first one to crowdfund a longevity pill you can do it here. Best and definitely packing for a bottle of Elysium’s Basis, Ea Birkkam

today: a tribute to the lab coat

“I live in my house as I live inside my skin: I know more beautiful, more ample, more sturdy and more picturesque skins: but it would seem to me unnatural to exchange them for mine.” Primo Levi

Sometimes you meet an interesting chemical compound in an entirely different background than you might expect. This happened to me when I encountered the beautifully symmetric molecule Perfluorodecalin for the second time in my life. I’ve heard of it for the first time in science fiction movies like The Abyss and in oldschool anime Neon Evangelion Genesis where they showed mammals, deep-sea divers and anime protagonists in underwater respiratory-systems (watch here and here). I must admit back then I thought they made the liquid-breathing thing entirely up but as I found out it actually has its roots in real science! After the movies I didn’t hear from PFD and other Perfluorochemical molecules enough to take notice of it and forgot about it. Until last week, which was the time I decided to check out new makeup and skincare like Sunday Riley’s Effortless Tinted Primer and La Prairie’s Cellular Power Charge Night(499 USD!). So there it was, right in their ingredients: Perfluorodecalin (or’Rejuvenox’). What was it doing there?

Perfluorodecalin is a derivative of decalin in which all of the hydrogen atoms are replaced by fluorine atoms. Your alert bell might ring when you hear poisonous fluorine but in Perfluorodecalin it is both chemically and biologically inert (not reacting). It is stable up to 400°C and finds its use in nanomedicinal applications as a carrier for molecular imaging agents and drugs (check 1, 2, 3). According to Sunday Riley it keeps the Effortless primer “drenched in oxygen.” As a magic ingredient that sits in between the silicone base of the primer and can dissolve and deliver oxygen to the skin. There are alot of claims like anti-aging, acne-reducing effects on side of Sunday Riley and La Prairie takes it even further with pretensions from Dr. Daniel Stangl, lead researcher of La Prairie. He stated in an interview with Vogue Germany that the barrier function of skin is lower during the nighttime and the skin is more permeable to active ingredients then. ‘Cellular Power Charge Night’ supposedly uses this knowledge to implant Retinol for the formation of collagen and elastin fibers aswell as Perfluorodecalin, the ‘oxygen booster’ (read here). If you’re serious about some promising evidence or wary words about PFD check out following sites (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). I couldn’t find anything satisfying about the retinol-enhancing properties and independent, clinical trials about claims like this. Only studies which vaguely implify wound healing properties. Anyways, you can be sure everytime words like ‘oxygenize’, ‘oxygen-loaded’ and ‘oxygen’ in general pop up on the product it is very likely to contain fluorocarbon. To blast pure oxygen alone in your skincare product with no reasonable ‘nanocarrier’ like PFD would be witless, if you heard about ROS (reactive oxygen species) which might emerge, you would know it could support the damage of our mitochondria and therefore interrupt a healthy cell function. If I missed something important, got something wrong (I hope I didn’t) or if you found studies worthy of mention feel free to put them in the comment section! Packing up for a trip to Amsterdam, Ea Birkkam
 

today: the skiing minimalist

“Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.” Rainer Maria Rilke

It doesn’t matter if you are a biochemistry student, hollywood starlet or just an open mind: the question of why we aren’t immortal unites us. Let’s all thank the so-called ‘biogerontologists’, scientists who diligently search for an answer to this question. When you’re young you may think it is way too early to think about age at all but at the latest when you reach the twenty mark you are very likely to start to get conscious on this topic. Because that’s when the cosmetic industry reminds us that our collagen production decreases and we need to preserve what’s still left with sunscreen, innovative skincare etc. The average population thinks about starting a family and some might experience physiological changes which make them feel old. I spent the last years trying to understand what we already know about aging but it’s not very easy. Cell Biology is still a striving and exciting branch of science and you can be sure by the end of this sentence a few smart heads have already found another major piece of the puzzle, important enough to be mentioned here. To clear things up: I am not ‘anti’ aging in particular but I’ve always been a fan of preserving what you have and taking good care of it. At the end of this series on ‘aging’ I will focus on protective skin active ingredients, which are scientifically proven to keep skin young. Let’s start with the first theories made by early biogerontologists on why we age:

Rate-of-living theory
There are various popular theories about why we age and most of them add together to one explanation. 1908 Max Rubners introduced his “rate-of-living theory” after he observed the body temperature in relation to their body size of mammals and birds. He proposed that a slow metabolism increases an animal’s longevity and observation was that larger animals outlived smaller animals, and the metabolic rates of larger animals were slower per rate. Twenty years later Raymond Pearl expanded his theory with experiments on fruit flies (drosophila) which have shown that a decrease of environmental temperature go along with a increase of lifespan. But there was still one problem: it was not applicable between all species (source 1, 2, 3).

Mitochondrial theory of aging
1958 Denham Harman, a research chemist of Shell’s reaction kinetics department who was studying free radical reactions in petroleum products, completed a part of Pearl’s theory. He developed the idea of radical induced damages like replication- and translator errors, aswell as radiation and toxic substance induced changes can induce the senescence or death of a cell. All his studies showed that antioxidants increased the average lifespan, none really showed an increase in maximum life span. Decades of research later his conclusion was that mitochondria, the powerhouse of cells, were not affected by antioxidants that came from the outside. So he deduced that mitochondria determine lifespan. A new theory was born: the “mitochondrial theory of aging” (source 1, 2)

Telomere theory of aging and Hayflick limit
At the end of last century another theory popped up: the telomere theory of aging. Researchers found out that the cause for the shortening of chromosomal ends (telomers) in proliferated cells was the disability of dna-strings ends, for mechanical reasons, to be fully doubled after each replication round. To prevent genetic damage, cells developed telomers, repetitive nucleotid sequences. According to Leonard Hayflick, with each round of dna replication and increasing age they shorten until finally the prior protected part of the dna is damaged, which weakens the stability of chromosomes altogether and leads to apoptose- the cell death. Basically it means you can tell by the length of the telomere how often the cell can replicate until it suddenly stops. Hayflick demonstrated normal human cells in vitro divide about 52 times until they automatically enter the senescence phase. Telomere shortening happens mainly with proliferating cells, while for example stemcells and cancerous cells produce an enzyme called telomerase which prolongs the telormers again after a replication round (Source 1, 2, 3, 4).

Negligible Senescence in nature and SENS
In the last years several genes and their proteins entered the limelight of gerontology; lots of them regulate stress resistance and repair of dna-damage, with transport functions or antioxidant effects. It appeared to be that aging is a programmed species- and cell specific process. Imagine a car that wears out over time. It isn’t very different. So if you think like there’s nothing you could do about the aging process you should look how Aubrey de Grey feels about it. Some might think the Cambridge researcher with a tremendous beard is more of a dreamer than a scientist but I like his fervor. He basically breaks down the types of Aging Damage to 7 and there is a TED video that shows his enthusiasm quite well and is actually very funny (see here). Read more here 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

I really hope this small biogerontology journey didn’t confuse you too much and made you as excited about this topic as I am. It’s crazy how many researchers work together to encipher the mystery of aging and are looking for the molecular fountain of youth. Consider this a humble overview! Next week we’ll see some examples of the ‘immortality gene’ in animals like the hydra. Best, Ea Birkkam

today: Eve from Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)