Your brain is your greatest asset but it is also your body’s most vulnerable organ. It requires constant support from other major organs and is your most susceptible organ to oxidative stress during aging.
Here are some brain facts:
1. Your brain makes up only 2% of your total body weight but requires 20% of your heart’s output of blood to sustain the amount of oxygen that it needs.
2. Your brain is the most oxygen-demanding organ in your body.
3. Your brain uses chemicals (neurotransmitters) to relay important messages to other parts of your body. These same chemicals are also involved in chemical reactions that produce damaging free radicals.
4. If your brain cells become weak or die they cannot repair themselves. Their functions then can be permanently lost if cell death or damage occurs.
Given these susceptibilities, your brain is especially vulnerable to conditions that threaten oxygen supply, such as in head injury, stroke, lung diseases and heart failure. Under these conditions, brain activity will continue even without enough oxygen. This can cause problems that lead to extreme levels of oxidative stress and the over-production of damaging free radicals.
In diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, other damaging factors are at work. In Alzheimer’s disease, a toxic protein called beta-amyloid, forms in your brain tissue. This protein acts as an irritant and causes inflammation in your brain. This inflammation then causes the production of free radicals that can destroy any membranes and cells in their path.
Parkinson’s disease results from unregulated production of the brain chemical dopamine which, with the help of free radicals, becomes toxic to the brain cells that control your motor functions.
Even in a healthy brain, oxygen radicals are produced every moment during normal high-oxygen demand of neuronal activity. In a healthy brain, enzymes and nutritional antioxidants neutralize these radicals.
Benefits of Dietary Antioxidants
What safeguards can healthy people take to reduce risk of diseases and especially to protect their brains from oxidative stress over a lifetime?
The simplest answer is to follow a diet that includes abundant sources of antioxidant chemicals derived from plant foods. Evidence for the benefits of such a dietary regimen has only been demonstrated in experiments with animals up until now, but the results are convincing. Over the past eight years, the research activities of Dr. Jim Joseph of the US Department of Agriculture, Boston, have focused on how to protect the brain from oxidative stress with dietary use of antioxidant-rich plants such as strawberries, cranberries, elderberries, blueberries and spinach.
Dr. Joseph’s research findings—a message closely pertinent to this essay—can best be represented by a quote from one of his research reports in 1998: “increased antioxidant protection through diets comprised of fruits and vegetables identified as being high in total antioxidant activity might prevent or reverse the deleterious effects of oxidative stress on neurons.”
Summary: Oxidative stress is a major factor in brain aging. This stress can be combated or balanced by including dietary antioxidants into your daily life. The best way to do this is by eating lots of colorful fruits and vegetables each day.
Enter Resveratrol.
Aging is breakdown, but broken things can be fixed. Aging is characterized by a progressive deterioration of physiological functions and metabolic processes. The healthy reputation of dietary antioxidants just got more support, with one type turning in a spectacular anti-aging performance.
Resveratrol helps lower cholesterol, and is as much as 10 to 20 times more potent than vitamin E in protecting against LDL oxidation, a process that has been linked to the development of cardiovascular disease. Resveratrol in wine is known to prevent blood clots and widen (dilate) blood vessels, sometimes producing “Viagra-like” vasodilation effects. Resveratrol pills should ideally be consumed with meals, since this is when insulin and blood sugar levels rise and when oxidation is high.
Resveratrol appears to work as a powerful antioxidant helping quench free radical damage in the body, but also has a unique mechanism of action that may prove to have significant life extension properties. Antioxidant resveratrol action is very important for brain health because it can reduce the blood pressure by opening the arteries hence increasing the blood flow through them.
Research studies continue to find more interesting benefits from this red wine compound, including potential anti-cancer and anti-aging activity. As to its antiaging potential, resveratrol activates a cell’s survival defense enzyme, which prolongs the time cells have to repair their broken DNA. Thus, resveratrol is considered by some to be the most important anti oxidant supplement available today.
Although we are continually researching the best products in this area, we have found the product Bioforte Trans-Resveratrol produced by Biotivia to be the best of combination quality and price. Bioforte contains 500mg of resveratrol, 250mg of which is the trans-resveratrol isomer. It does not contain any cis-resveratrol, which has no beneficial health effects but which compromises the bulk of the resveratrol in many other company’s products. Although we consider Biotivia product to be the highest in quality, we have no monetary relationship with this company.
Note: Biotivia has recently released an even more powerful resveratrol product called TransMax that contains 500mg per serving, that is Double the normal content of the Bioforte product. We have all just switched to the TransMax formula and are very grateful that this kind of product is available.
Reading
* Lau FC, Shukitt-Hale B, Joseph JA. The beneficial effects of fruit polyphenols on brain aging. Neurobiol Aging. 2005 Dec;26 Suppl 1:128-32.
* Joseph JA, Shukitt-Hale B, Denisova NA, Prior RL, Cao G, Martin A, Taglialatela G, Bickford PC. Long-term dietary strawberry, spinach, or vitamin E supplementation retards the onset of age-related neuronal signal-transduction and cognitive behavioral deficits.
J Neurosci. 1998 Oct 1;18(19):8047-55.
* Joseph JA, Nadeau DA, Underwood A. The Color Code. Hyperion, New York, 2002.