Selenium and Anti-Aging

Hi there. Glad you found time to click by today. Got another email from Dr. Al that I want to share with you as soon as you fill your coffee mug and hoist a virtual megamuffin onto your plate. Okay, here we go...

Dear Bob,

I always had an idea that deep down, living longer isn’t what people want.

As long as they’re mobile and independent, and still have a sharp mind, most people accept that nature has given us a pretty good lifespan.

And that’s what my patients often tell me. They want a better quality of life, not more years.

That’s why I have always been about anti-aging. Extending life is a noble goal. But I want to help you live better now. And I’m very grateful to be living in a time when technology allows me to help you achieve that goal.

Because the fact is, you have an advantage over everyone who’s come before you. And that is, don’t have to let aging interfere with how you want to live.

All of the people at my clinic who have been on a protocol that maintains their telomeres have had incredible health-enhancing experiences. Their eyesight, their hair, their bodies... people tell me they simply feel better.

Telomeres are the basic clocks that tell your body how old your cells are. And everything that happens from the time you are born is dependent on how old the telomere tells your body to act.

And there’s so much new science coming out every day on how maintaining your telomere length keeps you younger for longer.

I was reminded of this while I was doing research for the presentation I gave a few weeks ago at the A4M Annual World Conference on Anti-Aging in Las Vegas. I came across some studies on an ant-aging nutrient I’ve had my eye on. Yet it’s been completely overlooked as a telomere protector.

For instance, I read a little-known study from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China. Researchers there were looking into why the mineral selenium seems to keep cells youthful and functional for longer.

They took liver cells and divided them into three groups. One group got no supplementation, but the other two got infusions of selenium.

After 3 weeks, the cells that were the most youthful and healthy were the ones that had gotten selenium.

But what interested me the most was that after 4 weeks, these cells’ telomeres were significantly longer than normal.

Giving the cells selenium didn’t just “turn on” the gene that produces telomerase (the enzyme that rebuilds the telomere). Telomerase in these cells skyrocketed!¹

As I did more research, I discovered that getting more selenium also stops telomere loss. It even improves telomere function.²

This effect on telomeres might be why people who get the least selenium age much faster than people who get more.³

Selenium is such an all-round anti-aging powerhouse that it’s one of the minerals I mention first when I tell my patients about my new Nutritional Pyramid.

• We need a lot of each nutrient that makes up the bottom of the pyramid, which I call primal nutrition. This gives us a solid nutritional base so we can avoid modern diseases like cancer.

• I call the second level of my nutrition pyramid ortho-nutrition. This is where you replace the minerals and nutrients we’re depleted of in the modern world.

• The third level helps you get nutrition beyond what is simply normal. I call this ultra-nutrition.

• The top of my Nutritional Pyramid is telo-nutrition. It includes all the nutrients you can use to maintain and lengthen telomeres.

Selenium helps you fulfill all four levels.

Selenium used to be something we got fairly easily from our food. But you can’t get the amount of selenium that we would have gotten in primordial times.

If you were foraging, you could have eaten a few Brazil nuts every day and gotten all the selenium you needed. You might have even gotten enough through vegetables and plants, which took up plenty of minerals in ancient times.

Today, vegetables are somewhat void of minerals. In fact, you’d have to eat 10 servings of spinach to get the same level of minerals from just one serving about 50 years ago.⁴

That makes selenium something important for both primal and ortho-nutrition.

Also, even though selenium is a powerful antioxidant itself, it also helps your body make an even stronger antioxidant, glutathione. This super-antioxidant effect of selenium makes it ideal for ultra-nutrition.

And, as I just showed you, selenium also protects and lengthens telomeres.

So here you have an anti-aging superstar mineral that can keep your body acting much younger… yet almost no one gets enough of it.

Processing and cooking both deplete the selenium in food. So for most of my patients I recommend getting it from fresh, freeze-dried, or aged garlic. Garlic has a bioactive form of selenium. Start with one capsule or one clove and slowly increase to three capsules or cloves after each meal.

You can also eat Brazil nuts every day. Each has around 100 micrograms of selenium. But while 100 mcg is fine for primal and ortho-nutrition, it’s a good idea to eat a bunch of Brazil nuts to get enough selenium for telomerase activation.

A good multi-nutrient supplement will give you at least 200 micrograms of selenium, enough for telomerase activation. The problem is, the government’s recommendation is only 55 mcg. So only my and a very few other multi-nutrient formulas will give you enough; a full 200mcg of bioactive selenium.

To Your Good Health,

Al Sears, MD

1. Liu Q, Wang H, Hu D, Ding C, Xiao H, Xu H, Shu B, Xu S. "Effects of sodium selenite on telomerase activity and telomere length." Sheng Wu Hua Xue Yu Sheng Wu Wu Li Xue Bao (Shanghai). 2003;35(12):1117-22.
2. Ferguson L, Karunasinghe N, Zhu S, Wang A. "Selenium and its' role in the maintenance of genomic stability." Mutat Res. 2012;733(1-2):100-10.
3. Mocchegiani E, et. al. "Micronutrient-gene interactions related to inflammatory/immune response and antioxidant activity in ageing and inflammation. A systematic review." Mech Ageing Dev. 2014;136-137:29-49.
4. Heinrich, Elmer. “The Root of All Disease.” TRC press, 2000. 84 pages.

As soon as you wash down the last of your muffin, get out there and buy some of those selenium-rich fruits. I want to keep you around, enjoying life and reading my blog as long as I can.

See ya, eh!

Bob