Articles in Healthspan

Mitochondria: Exploring 5 Lifestyle Habits to Benefit Cell Health

Mitochondria: Exploring 5 Lifestyle Habits to Benefit Cell Health

Any way we can boost mitochondria helps us to increase the longevity of our cells and support energy production. In this article, we explore lifestyle habits that improve mitochondrial health and support healthy aging.

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How is NAD+ Made? De Novo Synthesis

How is NAD+ Made? De Novo Synthesis

Most organisms have several alternatives for producing the NAD+ molecule. In humans, there are three major NAD+ biosynthesis pathways: the De Novo Pathway, starting from the essential amino acid L-tryptophan; the Preiss-Handler pathway, using niacin (nicotinic acid); and the Salvage Pathway from niacinamide (nicotinamide). In this article, we’ll be covering the De Novo Pathway.

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Mitochondria Health: An Exploration of Temperature and Light Therapy

Mitochondria Health: An Exploration of Temperature and Light Therapy

Any way we can boost mitochondria helps us to increase the longevity of our cells and support energy production. Here we explore temperature and light therapy to improve mitochondrial health and support healthy aging.

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What Is Fatty Acid Oxidation? How Cells Use Fats to Make Energy (ATP)

What Is Fatty Acid Oxidation? How Cells Use Fats to Make Energy (ATP)

Fatty acids are an important fuel for the generation of cell energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Fatty acid oxidation, also known as beta-oxidation, is the metabolic pathway of fatty acid breakdown for energy production. Fatty acids are the primary source of energy for the heart (i.e., the cardiac muscle) and skeletal muscle during rest or moderate physical activity.

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Can We Change the Future of Disease Prevention by Decoding Our Biology? - An Interview With Dr. Momo Vuyisich

Can We Change the Future of Disease Prevention by Decoding Our Biology? - An Interview With Dr. Momo Vuyisich

Is science on the cusp of changing the future of disease prevention via  a deeper understanding of an individual’s biology at a molecular level?

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How Does The Immune System Work? Part 2: The Adaptive Immune System

How Does The Immune System Work? Part 2: The Adaptive Immune System

The adaptive immune system is responsible for the more complex and optimized immune responses that develop when innate immunity is insufficient to manage a threat. It is the specific immunity we acquire over time as the immune system is challenged with new antigens and learns to deal with them.

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 How is NAD+ Made? Preiss-Handler Pathway

How is NAD+ Made? Preiss-Handler Pathway

In 1958, Jack Preiss and Philip Handler published a scientific paper describing how NAD+ was made from niacin in three steps.(1) This pathway was later named the Preiss-Handler pathway after the co-discoverers. It describes the enzyme steps needed to convert niacin into the NAD+ molecule.

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Will Wearing Glasses Offer Any Protection Against Respiratory Viruses?

Will Wearing Glasses Offer Any Protection Against Respiratory Viruses?

A recent article in the New York Post suggested that wearing glasses might offer some degree of protection against respiratory viruses. We’ve also read in quite a few places comments about wearing eye protection as a possible respiratory virus prevention suggestion. Is it likely to work?

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How The Gut Microbiota Influences Our Immune System

How The Gut Microbiota Influences Our Immune System

The gut microbiota influences many aspects of human physiology, from metabolism, to the cardiovascular system or the nervous system, for example. In this article, we focus on the interaction between the gut microbiota and our immune system.

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NAD+ Consumption Uses: An Overview

NAD+ Consumption Uses: An Overview

The NAD+ form of the molecule is required for certain cellular signaling reactions that change the way cells behave. Unlike redox, where the molecule is conserved, the NAD+ molecule is broken apart or “consumed” when used for signaling. It’s these NAD+ consumption uses that have been a main reason for the resurgence of scientific interest in strategies to boost NAD+.

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Anti-Aging Benefits of Intermittent Fasting

Anti-Aging Benefits of Intermittent Fasting

In Silicon Valley, the hub of anti-aging research and funding, countless entrepreneurs and high-profile celebrities use fasting to combat the effects of aging. In Anti-Aging Benefits of Fasting, we will explore the mechanisms that create these fasting benefits. This part is more scientific than the others, but we emphasize only crucial components in an easily digestible format.

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How Metabolism Supports Immunity

How Metabolism Supports Immunity

Immunometabolism is the crosstalk between metabolic and immunological processes. Mitochondria, the cellular structures that generate cell energy, are key elements in the crosstalk between metabolic and immune signaling pathways. 

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The Ultimate “Light Diet” to Boost Mitochondrial and Vision Health

The Ultimate “Light Diet” to Boost Mitochondrial and Vision Health

Matt Maruca, CEO of Ra Optics, shares with us 8 steps to optimizing, both mitochondrial and vision health through the power of light

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What is CD38? An Exploration of NAD+ Consumption Uses and Functions of CD38

What is CD38? An Exploration of NAD+ Consumption Uses and Functions of CD38

In this article, we’re going to introduce an indirect way of supporting NAD+. Rather than making more, this article will be teaching you about using less. Using less requires downregulating a protein called cluster of differentiation 38 (CD38 for short). When CD38 is not as active, less NAD+ is used by it. The result is higher NAD+ levels and greater NAD+ availability for important healthy aging uses.

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Mitochondria Functions For Healthy Aging: What does the Mitochondria do?

Mitochondria Functions For Healthy Aging: What does the Mitochondria do?

In this article, we will take a look at how mitochondrial dysfunction can cause damage to cells and mitochondrial quality control pathways act to prevent or overcome that damage. We will also discuss how aging affects mitochondrial function and nutritional strategies to support it.

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Hormesis: Benefits of Training Your Stress Response

Hormesis: Benefits of Training Your Stress Response

On the Collective Insights podcast, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Dr. Dan Pardi, Daniel Schmachtenberger, and Dr. Dan Stickler share their insights on the difference between beneficial and damaging stress. We answer "What is hormesis?" and "How can we effectively manage stress?" Read on to understand how certain kinds of stress actually benefit the body, and which ones to avoid. 

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Why Algae is a Powerful Longevity and Detox Hack - A Q+A With the Founder of ENERGYbits

Why Algae is a Powerful Longevity and Detox Hack - A Q+A With the Founder of ENERGYbits

As Neurohackers, longevity, in relation to both lifespan and healthspan, is a topic of great interest to us. Scientific understanding in these areas is advancing rapidly as are studies linking algae to longevity.

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Qualia Life: Putting the Healthy Aging Puzzle Together

Qualia Life: Putting the Healthy Aging Puzzle Together

We all age. But, we don’t all age at the same rate. From a bottom-up point of view, we are a complex colony of tens of trillions of individual cells. We care about what healthier cells allows the body to do better. Qualia Life is our solution to cell support for better aging. 

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Antiviral Immunity: Understanding Viruses and How the Immune System Responds to Viral Infections

Antiviral Immunity: Understanding Viruses and How the Immune System Responds to Viral Infections

Viruses are everywhere cellular life is present, often in unfathomable numbers. They mutate very often, frequently by recombining with other viruses. This means that new viruses are constantly being generated.

As we’ll learn in this article, viruses are very simple, but despite their simplicity, they are very effective and impressive little creatures. We’ll also learn how our immune system rises to the challenge.   

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What Is The Citric Acid Cycle?

What Is The Citric Acid Cycle?

The citric acid cycle, also known as the Krebs cycle or tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle, is a circular loop rotating through eight organic acid intermediates (e.g., citrate, malate, oxaloacetate). This cycle plays a critical role in moving cell energy production forward, because it is the first pathway of the final stage of energy extraction from nutrients, in which carbon units are fully oxidized. The intermediate products formed in this cycle are also used to build molecules including proteins, DNA, and RNA.

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Neglected Areas of Research: What Study Would You Have Done with Unlimited Resources?

Neglected Areas of Research: What Study Would You Have Done with Unlimited Resources?

To improve our healthcare we need important research that is not being done. Often times health topics aren't studied due to lack of funds and resources. We’ve been asking our podcast guests where the missing research is in the field they are experts in. Read on to find out what they said.

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Mitohormesis: How Mitochondria Protect Themselves from Oxidative Stress

Mitohormesis: How Mitochondria Protect Themselves from Oxidative Stress

In this article, we’re going to learn about mitohormesis, the activity of reactive oxygen species (ROS) as signaling molecules, and how and why ROS can be both beneficial and harmful. We will also discuss what leads to excessive ROS production and accumulation, how this associates with aging, and where antioxidants fit into the equation. Lastly, we’ll discuss nutritional strategies that can support the antioxidant defenses cells and mitochondria use to protect themselves against excessive ROS.

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How Does the Immune System Work? Part 1: An Exploration of the Functions, Responses, and Processes of the Innate Immune System

How Does the Immune System Work? Part 1: An Exploration of the Functions, Responses, and Processes of the Innate Immune System

The immune system is the collection of cells, tissues, and molecules that work together to recognize the healthy cells that make up the body, and protect us against the unfamiliar or damaged. 

The immune system monitors our body continuously searching for certain categories of things that may threaten our health: infectious microbes, viruses, fungi, and parasites (i.e., germs or pathogens); toxic cellular products; and damaged or diseased cells, including senescent or tumor cells.

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Neurohacker’s Guide to Hand Washing as an Antiviral Strategy

Neurohacker’s Guide to Hand Washing as an Antiviral Strategy

One of the public health goals of prevention is “flattening the epidemic curve*,” which essentially means decreasing the growth of new infections now, so they can be spread out over time. This is the reason why businesses are asking employees to work from home and governments are enacting policies to support social distancing strategies. In essence, public health wants to push some of the infections that might otherwise occur in the next weeks to sometime in the future … the further into the future the better.

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Can Gargling Prevent Upper Respiratory Tract Infections?

Can Gargling Prevent Upper Respiratory Tract Infections?

There’s no data suggesting that gargling prevents infection from the virus causing COVID-19. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is too new to know. But, in general, gargling might have modest preventive benefit for colds (and likely less so for the flu). Once someone has an upper respiratory infection, gargling is not a treatment for the infection. It would, at best, offer some degree of soothing of sore throat symptoms.

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