Pomegranates May Help Fight Ageing

Researchers have found that a molecule in pomegranates, transformed by microbes in the gut, may enable muscle cells to protect themselves against one of the major causes of ageing.

As we age, our cells increasingly struggle to recycle their powerhouses.

Called mitochondria, these inner compartments are no longer able to carry out their vital function, and thus accumulate in the cell, researchers said.

This degradation affects the health of many tissues, including muscles, which gradually weaken over the years.

A buildup of dysfunctional mitochondria is also suspected of playing a role in other diseases of ageing, such as Parkinson's disease, they said.

Scientists from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Amazentis company in Switzerland identified a molecule that, all by itself, managed to re-establish the cell's ability to recycle the components of the defective mitochondria: urolithin A.

"It is the only known molecule that can relaunch the mitochondrial clean-up process, otherwise known as mitophagy. It is a completely natural substance, and its effect is powerful and measurable," said Patrick Aebischer from EPFL.

Researchers started out by testing their hypothesis on the usual suspect: the nematode C elegans.

It is a favourite test subject among ageing experts, because after just 8-10 days it is already considered elderly, they said.

The lifespan of worms exposed to urolithin A increased by more than 45 per cent compared with the control group, they said.

The results led researchers to test the molecule on animals that have more in common with humans.

In the rodent studies, like with C elegans, a significant reduction in the number of mitochondria was observed, indicating that a robust cellular recycling process was taking place.

Older mice, around two years of age, showed 42 per cent better endurance while running than equally old mice in the control group.

The fruit does not itself contain the 'miracle molecule', but rather its precursor.

That molecule is converted into urolithin A by the microbes that inhabit the intestine, researchers said.

Because of this, the amount of urolithin A produced can vary widely, depending on the species of animal and the flora present in the gut microbiome.

Some individuals do not produce any at all, they said.

Researchers are currently conducting first clinical trials to test the molecule in humans.

The findings were published in the journal Nature Medicine.

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Why vitamins may be bad for workouts

Many people take vitamins as part of their daily fitness regimens, having heard that antioxidants aid physical recovery and amplify the impact of workouts. But in another example of science undercutting deeply held assumptions, several new experiments find that antioxidant supplements may actually reduce the benefits of training.

Antioxidants became popular dietary supplements largely because they were said to sop up free radicals, the highly reactive oxygen molecules that are generated during daily activities. Physical exertion, through its breakdown of oxygen, results in the creation of large numbers of these molecules, which, in excess, can lead to cell death and tissue damage. So it seems logical that reducing the number of free radicals produced by exercise would be desirable.

Enter antioxidants, which absorb and deactivate free radicals. While the body creates its own antioxidants, until recently many researchers believed that we produce too few natural antioxidants to counteract the depredations from free radicals created during exercise. So many people who exercise began downing large doses of antioxidants such as vitamins C and E, even though few experiments in people had actually examined the precise physiological impacts of antioxidant supplements in people who work out.

For a study published last week in The Journal of Physiology, researchers with the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo and other institutions gathered 54 healthy adult men and women, most of them recreational runners or cyclists, and conducted a series of tests, including muscle biopsies, blood draws and treadmill runs, to establish their baseline endurance capacity and the cellular health of their muscles.

Then they divided the volunteers into two groups. Those in one group took four pills a day, delivering a total dose of 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C and 235 milligrams of vitamin E. Members of the second group got identical placebo pills.

Finally, they asked all of the participants to complete a vigorous 11-week training program, consisting of increasingly intense interval sessions once or twice per week, together with two weekly sessions of moderately paced hour-long runs. By the end, all of the volunteers were more fit than they had been at the start, with their maximum endurance capacity increasing by an average of about 8 per cent.

But their bodies had responded quite differently to the training. The runners who had swallowed the placebo pills showed robust increases of biochemical markers that are known to goose the creation of mitochondria, the tiny structures within cells that generate energy, in cells in their bloodstream and muscles. More mitochondria, especially in muscle cells, means more energy and, by and large, better health and fitness. The creation of new mitochondria is, in fact, generally held to be one of the most important effects of exercise.

But the volunteers who had consumed the antioxidants had significantly lower levels of the markers related to mitochondrial creation. The researchers didn’t actually count the specific populations of mitochondria within their volunteers’ muscles cells, but presumably, over time, those taking the antioxidants would see a smaller uptick in mitochondrial density than among those not taking them.

That finding echoes the results of another study of antioxidant supplementation and exercise, also published last year in The Journal of Physiology, in which half of a group of older men downed 250 milligrams daily of the supplement resveratrol, an antioxidant famously found in red wine, and the other half took a placebo. After two months of exercising, the men taking the placebo showed significant and favorable changes in their blood pressure, cholesterol profiles and arteries, with fewer evident arterial plaques.

The men taking the resveratrol were not as fortunate. They had exercised as much as the other men, but their blood pressures, cholesterol levels and arteries had remained stubbornly almost unchanged.

The supplements did not improve performance in comparison with a placebo, so why bother with them, Dr Goran Paulsen, a researcher at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, who led the vitamin C and E study, asked. “Personally, I would avoid high dosages” of antioxidants while training, he said. The science on the topic may not be complete, but the intimation of the recent studies is that by downing the supplements, “you risk losing some of the benefits of exercise”.

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Advantages Of Drinking Water In The Morning

1) Balances lymph system, which help perform daily functions, balances body fluids & fight infections.

2) Water helps to purge toxins from the blood & keeps the skin clear & glowing.

3) Helps weight lose. Drinking 16 ounces of chilled water can boost your metabolism by 24 % in the morning.

4) Increases production of new blood cells & muscle cells.

5) Purifies colon, by flushing out toxins & makes it easier to absorb nutrients.

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Heart: Heal thyself

Scientists have made a breakthrough towards treatment for heart attack, by instructing the injured heart in mice to heal by triggering cardiovascular regeneration that is driven by native heart stem cells.

The study,  shows that there was an effect on driving the formation of a small number of new cardiac muscle cells.

A Prof., said that this is the beginning of using the heart as a factory to produce growth factors for specific families of cardiovascular stem cells, and suggests that it may be possible to generate new heart parts without delivering any new cells to the heart itself.

The study is based upon another recent discovery in a lab, which was published in Cell Research.

The study, performed in mice, shows that only a single administration of a short pulse of expression of VEGFA is required, if it can be delivered to the exact region where the heart progenitors reside.

The therapeutic effect is long term, as shown by markedly improved survival following myocardial infarction with a single administration of the synthetic mRNA when given within 48 hours after the heart attack.

The long-term effect appears to be based on changing the fate of the native heart stem cells from contributing to cardiac fibrotic scar tissue and towards cardiovascular tissue.

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ADVANTAGES OF DRINKING WATER IN THE MORNING