28/06/2019
FBP PROGRAM
Omega-3 fatty acids — found in fish oil and flaxseed — are already known to help protect you from such age-related illnesses as heart disease. Now research shows they may slow cellular aging.
Doctors followed 608 San Francisco patients with stable coronary-artery disease and found that those with high blood levels of omega-3 fatty acids had less telomere shortening over the next five years. Telomeres are protective caps at the ends of chromosomes (frequently likened to the plastic tips that keep shoelaces from fraying), and telomere length is increasingly seen as a marker for biological aging — entirely separate from chronological age.
In earlier research, cardiologist Ramin Farzaneh-Far, who led the new omega-3 study, helped show that telomere length can be a predictor of death risk in humans. The new finding is exciting because, he says, "it means that telomere shortening is not inevitable." A good diet may not just keep you healthy. Perhaps it really can keep you young.
Tissue repair and stem cell renewal in carcinogenesis.
Cancer is increasingly being viewed as a stem cell disease, both in its propagation by a minority of cells with stem-cell-like properties and in its possible derivation from normal tissue stem cells. But stem cell activity is tightly controlled, raising the question of how normal regulation might be subverted in carcinogenesis. The long-known association between cancer and chronic tissue injury, and the more recently appreciated roles of Hedgehog and Wnt signalling pathways in tissue regeneration, stem cell renewal and cancer growth together suggest that carcinogenesis proceeds by misappropriating homeostatic mechanisms that govern tissue repair and stem cell self-renewal.
Dietary carotenoids protect human cells from damage
A physical chemistry technique based on singlet oxygen luminescence at about 1270 nm and a biological cell membrane technique were used to study the quenching of singlet oxygen by four carotenoids bound to the surface of lymphoid cells. All the carotenoids studied showed a beneficial effect in cell protection, but there were subtle differences between them.
