What this work seems to tell us is that any protocol that penetrates
to the cellular level and combats oxidative stress is likely to be a
huge life extender. At this point we know a suspension of bucky
balls is efficacious and that it is otherwise safe. Even better it
does not persist in the body.
A corollary of this is that a suspension of nanosized particles of
elemental carbon may perform just as well. It also needs to be
tested. I was involved with a group using such a suspension twenty
years ago and became interested in this form of carbon.
This experiment is a powerful indication that a carbon based protocol
will strip damaged material out of the living cells themselves and
refresh the body. Perhaps we need to blend biochar with maple syrup
and some baking soda and ingest it? This should be safe enough and
do no harm. We may be very surprised.
The method would be simply to tumble equal amounts of baking soda and
plant biochar together until smoothly blended, then add it into
heated maple syrup until a thick suspension is produced. A teaspoon
of this concoction goes down easily when just the baking soda is used
and should be even better with the biochar.
Since such a concoction could have been put together by natives in
the Eastern part of North America, we should look for precedents.
We will have to call it the elixir of youth and it might even be the
source of legends about the fountain of youth in this geographical
setting
Diet
of buckyballs nearly doubles rat lifespan
By Brian Dodson
22:08 April 22, 2012
Sometimes I (almost)
envy mice, rats, and yeast - it seems that almost any aging research
we carry out on them doubles their lifespan and returns
semi-senescent (say, a human equivalent of about 60 years of age -
not thinking of anyone in particular, of course) to youthful vigor.
It now appears that dramatic anti-aging results are associated with
dietary ingestion of buckyballs, more properly known asC-60
fullerene.
A recent French study
looking for chronic toxicity resulting from ingesting buckyballs
dissolved in olive oil found that 10 month old rats who ingested the
human equivalent of a tenth of a gram of C-60 buckyballs (which in
technical grades cost less than US$10/gram) several times a week
showed extended lifespans instead of toxic effects.
All C-60-treated rats
survived to at least 59 months, with the oldest surviving to 66
months. The control group lived for periods ranging from 17 months to
37 months, while an additional group fed only the extra olive oil
lived for periods of 36 to 57 months. For the curious, the olive oil
dosage was equivalent to a person adding about eight tablespoons of
uncooked olive oil to their daily diet without compensating for the
additional calories. Similar results have been reported for
mammals held in a state of semi-starvation, but that is
obviously not a pleasant lifestyle.
All fullerenes are
susceptible to clumping when dissolved in oil, so the preparation of
the olive-oil/C-60 solution is rather lengthy. In these tests, 50 mg
of C-60 buckyballs were added to 10 ml of virgin olive oil. These
were stirred for two weeks at ambient temperatures with no incident
light. Following the stirring, the solutions were centrifuged at
5,000 g for an hour. The fluid was separated from the precipitate,
and was then passed through a 0.25 micron filter. The resulting
liquid contained 0.8 mg/ml of C-60 buckyballs.
The results beg the
question - what is going on here? Is the life extension just for
those lucky rats again, or is there a mechanism that might transfer
over to humans? The study was aimed at discovering if a diet of
buckyballs has any toxic effects, and the good news is that no
toxicity was found. The buckyballs did move throughout the body
(including the brain and central nervous system), and even enter
individual cells. The ingested C-60 had an elimination half-life from
blood of about 10 hours, so was essentially fully eliminated from the
body within two days. It is not clear from the report if the C-60 was
eliminated from intracellular fluid on that time scale.
Specific studies of
the effect of C-60 buckyballs on oxidative stress in the rats were
performed by studying the effects of carbon tetrachloride (CCl4)
injection. Carbon tetrachloride is well known to be poisonous to
rats, being highly hepatotoxic (toxic to the liver). It is also
associated with delirium and intoxication such as is experienced in
the abuse of solvents.
Rats which had been
pretreated by water, by olive oil, and by olive oil containing C-60
buckyballs all showed typical signs of intoxication within a few
minutes of CCl4 injection. However, while intoxication persisted in
the water and olive oil groups for 24 hours, the olive oil and C-60
group emerged from intoxication after only five hours.
In rats experiencing
the pretreatment, but unexposed to carbon tetrachloride, autopsy
revealed essentially normal livers. In those given a CCl4 injection,
however, the livers from rats pretreated with water or olive oil
showed important damage - a great deal of inflammation as well as
large necrotic areas (dying or dead tissue). In contrast, the livers
from rats pretreated with olive oil and C-60 buckyballs showed little
damage or CCl4-induced cell death. Biochemical markers of liver
damage showed far less elevation in the rats pretreated with olive
oil and C-60.
It does appear there
is a real physiological effect on metabolic processes, and that
oxidative stress in particular is significantly reduced in rats by
chronic oral ingestion of an olive oil/C-60 solution. As oxidative
stress is one of the factors usually associated with aging, there may
well be a reasonable mechanism for the lifespan extension, especially
if excess oxidation within individual cells is prevented by
intracellular buckyballs. Will people react to a treatment of this
sort with lifespans of 180-200 years? Only time will tell.
The research was
recently published in the journal Biomaterials
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