TURNING OFF AGING, DRIVING DOWN HEALTH CARE COSTS

      Aging is not simply decay. You just don't wear out. But this how we have thought about aging until the research of the last five years has replaced our presumptive conclusions with knowledge.   One particular researcher from UC San Francisco demonstrated in 1993 that by manipulating a single gene in a one-millimeter worm; the worm's  healthy life span could be doubled.

      Cynthia Kenyon 's latest research has linked the growth of cancerous tumors to the aging process. The  conclusion from these two monumental breakthrough studies is that: is we can manipulate a single gene to slow aging, we can create a resistance in our bodies to the growth of cancerous tumors.

     You may recall from basic high school biology that cells divide: research has shown for quite some time that as cells divide little mistakes occur metabolically.  In our youth, our body's cells repair this damage to cells, tissues, organs: but as we age (not chronolgically, but metabolically), these mistakes accumulate, and our ability to repair all the damage created by these mistakes in cell division, just can't keep up.

      Mistakes in cell division, and metabolic aging imposed by poor lifestyle habits (the bad synergy that comes from poor nutrition, chronic idleness instead of movement, not forcing our systems to grow and adapt on the physical levels, and other forms of chronic stress) produce just about every disease and degenerative human condition that we as a society experience: Cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Osteoporosis, cardiac arrest, stroke.

     The promise of this research is that controlling the genes that control aging, may be easier that controlling the decades of poor lifestyle choices that contribute to a person's disease, and degenerative aging. 

The financial value to our health care system would be huge: as lifestyle related disease, and degenerative aging have overburdened our country's health care system, and our individual health care premiums to a critical breaking point.

     Now that we have the knowledge that aging can be turned on, and turned off, should our society continue to financially support individuals'  that repeatedly make illness choices, overuse and burden the health care systems, and  drive the cost of medical care for those practicing wellness thru the roof ?  It is the individual's right to make illness choices, including those that lead to morbid obesity.  But these individuals  are making themselves ill, overusing the health care system, and pay the same monthly fees that I do.  Health care should be VERY expensive for those making illness choices, maybe that would be the necessary deterrent.