One of the most exciting mystery stories of our time will not be found anywhere on the TV weekly schedule, crowded as it is with all manner, shapes, and sizes of detectives pursuing villains. Nevertheless, an increasing army of modern sleuths are fanning out all over the world, tracking Public Enemy No. 1 of humankind in remote mountain fastnesses in the Caucasus, in Hunzaland of western Pakistan, in Vilcabamba in Ecuador, and in hundreds of gleaming laboratories all over the world. That enemy is the mysterious and elusive aging factor.
What makes us age? What is the name and identity of this thief that steals the bloom from the prettiest cheek, the color from hair, the blood from the heart, the sound of song from the ears, the memory from the brain, the very air from the lungs, and the grace and flexibility of our bodies and limbs until, like Socrates, we moan, “I cannot eat, I cannot drink; the pleasures of youth and love are fled away; there was a good time once, but now that is gone, and life is no longer life.”
In Camelot, no one ever grew old. With the help of Merlin’s magic, everybody just “youthened” with the passing years. And that is the dream that our modern Merlins, clad in white coats, armed with their microscopes, measuring devices, and glass retorts, are pursuing—the ephemeral “Fountain of Youth,” which brought Ponce de León to Florida and which ever after has remained a haven for those fleeing the nemesis of time. Ponce de León, like other explorers of his time, was a little confused on geography, for the mythical fountain was said to lie somewhere in southern India. Other seekers of eternal youth may have been as far off the mark as he was. For in every age, there have been necromancers who have offered every conceivable remedy to outwit Father Time—the semen of crocodile; testicle and heart of lion or tiger; genitalia of wolf; philosophers’ stones; amulets; nauseous secret concoctions sold as elixirs; cakes baked in the shape of genitalia with magic spices; the exotic mixture called “Orvietan,” so popular in the time of Louis XIV; geracomy (sleeping with virgins, as King David, according to the Bible, is reputed to have tried with little success); and even castration, since eunuchs seemed to age more slowly than their more virile brothers.
It was the Chinese who invented alchemy, and one of its goals, in addition to learning how to transmute base metal into gold, was to discover the elixir that would rejuvenate and restore youth. Many Chinese believe that the elixir has already been discovered in Fo-ti-Tieng, a herb (Hydrocotyle asiatica) found only in certain jungle districts of the Eastern tropics. Fo-ti-Tieng means “elixir of life” or “long-life elixir.” It owes most of its reputation to the fact that a famous Chinese herbalist, Li Chung Yun, lived (it is said) to be 256 years of age, dying in 1933, and he used the herb daily throughout his life. The New York Times carried an extensive story about this remarkable man, whose age was apparently confirmed by the Chinese government after thorough investigation by the head of Chang-Tu University. Li had outlived twenty-three wives and was living with the twenty-fourth at the time of his death.
Li himself attributed his longevity to this herb, which he claimed had powerful rejuvenating qualities, along with ginseng root, and he consumed only vegetables grown above the ground and fruit. In addition to his complete vegetarianism, Li was said to have had a calm and serene attitude toward life. Nevertheless, other Chinese venerables have partaken of both the Fo-ti-Tieng and ginseng root and set great store by their rejuvenating properties.
Some Western research has been done on this plant, but perhaps more should be undertaken.
Another herb said to be equally as effective as the Chinese plant is gotu kola, grown principally in India, the islands of the Indian Ocean, and some parts of southern Africa.
The Ceylon Daily News of December 22, 1932, ran an article calling gotu kola “The Secret of Perpetual Youth.” The article described the plant as “a small herb that creeps along the ground, having fan-shaped leaves of a pale-green color. It is claimed that this vegetable will increase the vitality of seventy and eighty [year olds] to that of forty. The leaves have a marked energizing effect on the cells of the brain and can preserve it indefinitely. The leaves are not a stimulant but a brain food.”
The aging and old fare quite well in Oriental cultures and in tribal and peasant societies. In Japan, the elders wore red silk lining in their kimona sleeves upon attaining a certain age as a mark of respect and eminence. In the mountain communities that are now being studied so extensively, the “long-living ones” are cherished, usefully employed, and their wisdom honored in counsel until their stay on this plane is completed.
In marked contrast, age is much feared in modern Western industrial societies. For in addition to the penalties of declining vigor and faculties, and the increase of chronic disease, there are other handicaps and prejudices that seriously tarnish the gold in the “golden age.” Early retirement pinches income and shelves talent and ability that should be contributing the richness of maturity, experience, and wisdom to the general welfare of the community as well as to one’s own personal life. The aging are banished to playpens set up by real-estate developers to keep the “retirees” occupied with shuffleboard so they will not be underfoot in the households, businesses, and marketplaces of their younger relatives. Expensive illnesses eat away at savings that could be better employed in stimulating useful activity and enterprise. The onset of serious disease is terrifying when the prospect of inhumane nursing homes looms as the solution to the family’s inability or unwillingness to cope with chronic and terminal illness. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all is the onset of senility in a still-functioning body.
Must this be so? Can we escape this common fate?
The answer must be yes, because throughout the ages there are outstanding exceptions—men and women who are miracles of mental, physical, artistic, and creative energy at an age that extends far beyond the biblical “three score and ten.”
In the annals of the ageless, much is recorded about the ability of males to produce progeny in their seventh, eighth, and ninth decades, and after the century mark, for while women measure youth by their beauty and looks, men measure youth by virility and sexual vigor. Peter Albrecht had seven children after he remarried in his eighty-fifth year and lived to be 123; Gurgen Douglas, a Swede, had eight children after he remarried in his eighty-fifth year—one of whom was born in Douglas’s one hundred and third year. Even in modern times many men father children in their sixth and seventh decades. Dr. Harvey, the famous English physician who studied Thomas Parr and other long-living individuals, reported that the condition of their circulation and genitalia was very good.
In 1956, Javier Pereira, an elderly male from Colombia, South America, was brought to the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center for study. Mr. Pereira, a Chibcha Indian of a long-lived tribe, which produces many members living past 100 years of age, remained in the hospital for two weeks while doctors probed, tested, X-rayed, and pondered on his 167 years of age and excellent condition. Doctors Frank Glenn and Arthur J. Okinaka in 1964 published an excellent report on the study of Mr. Pereira.1 Dr. Glenn observed that the Chibchas, like the residents of Vilcabamba, are mostly farmers living largely on cereals, fruits, and some milk products. They eat little meat and drink large amounts of coffee made from locally grown coffee beans. The patient was also said to have smoked “black tobacco” and chewed “cocoa.”
In our own time and in our own society all of us have admired those prodigies of talent and “agelessness,” the late Pablo Picasso, Pablo Casals, Bernard Baruch, Harry S. Truman, Igor Stravinsky, Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill, Konrad Adenauer, and the perennial thirty-nine-year-old Jack Benny; artist Marc Chagall, Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, Gloria Swanson, Golda Meir, Marlene Dietrich, Leopold Stokowski, Jimmy Durante, and Jack Benny’s equally youthful pal, George Burns. The list could go on endlessly and I apologize to anyone I have omitted. The example of all of these remarkable individuals is an inspiration that offers hope to everyone. Perhaps of even greater importance is the fact that if some can do it—i.e., beat Father Time—there must be secrets still locked away in nature that can open the magic door to prolonged youth and life for most of humankind.
Living Proof
Titian produced some of his greatest paintings at the age of ninety-nine; Roscoe Pound wrote five volumes on American jurisprudence after he was eighty-six; Alonzo Stagg mowed his lawn with a hand mower at the age of ninety-eight; Thomas Parr, a Shropshireman of Old England, not only threshed grain at 130 years of age and lived to be 153, but he was accused and tried for committing a sexual offense at the age of 102. Drakenberg, a Dane, buried in the cathedral in Aarhus, Denmark, lived to 146 years of age, and at 130 the much-married evergreen fell in love and made advances to a sixteen-year-old girl; the Italian baron Baravicino de Capellis married when he was eighty-four for the fourth time and had seven children before he died at an age somewhere over 107.
This hope is what has sent so many doctors, journalists, and film crews to the three enclaves of longevity and youthfulness, where entire populations seem to have found the secret. In Hunzaland, in Vilcabamba, and in the Abkhazia region of Georgia, and in fact elsewhere in Georgia—the mountainous region of Russia—most of the population, instead of the exceptional and rare individual, live to a human’s full current potential into the nineties and well past 100, free of heart trouble, cancer, and the other crippling chronic diseases that mar the later years of more than half of the men and women of the United States and other industrialized societies.
In Vilcabamba—an Incan word meaning “sacred valley”—investigators found that 16.4 percent of the population was over sixty years of age (compared with 10 percent in America); and nine of the 819 inhabitants were over 100. The “longevos” and all others are farmers, who work hard and vigorously throughout their lifetime. There is no such word or concept as retirement. Their diet is very low in animal protein and fat, running around 1,200 calories, and is composed chiefly of fruits, vegetables, and grains. But they do make a strong local rum drink from sugar cane, which is grown in the valley, and they drink coffee and chew coca leaves.
The local medicine man cures with home remedies, including tobacco and whiskey—for treatment of a variety of complaints—the coca leaves, and the waters of a mineral spring that is supposed to have great curative properties.
Although there is absolutely no sanitation (one resident admits to not having had a bath in ten years) and infant mortality is very high, the adults do not have the common diseases that inflict their countrymen living in cities. Most of the population is European—not of Indian descent—and the genetic strain of longevity has been well protected by the insulation of the valley.
Hunza, ruled by a hereditary line of leaders known as Mirs, is one of the most inaccessible places on the earth. Unfortunately, many researchers in the past thirty-five years have penetrated its mountain seclusion and consequently the extraordinary perfect health of the Hunzas is beginning to be affected by civilized acquaintance with sugars and other contaminating influences.
A Pakistani nutritionist who has surveyed the diet of fifty-five adult males in Hunza puts the daily diet average at 1,923 calories: 50 grams of protein, 36 grams of fat, and 354 grams of carbohydrate. Meat and dairy products account for only 1 percent of the total.
From other reports we gather that the diet is composed of grains, leafy green vegetables, root vegetables, dried legumes, fresh milk and buttermilk, clarified butter and cheese, fresh and sun-dried apricots and mulberries, and grape wine. Oil extracted from apricot seeds is used in cooking.
Like the Vilcabambans, the Hunzas work hard to wrest a living from the rocky hills and “one sees an unusual number of old people vigorously and agilely climbing up and down the steep slopes of the valley.”
Renee Taylor in Hunza Health Secrets 2 points out that the remarkable thing about the populace is that it is free from heart attacks, cancer—and war.
The Hunzakuts are genetically pure through their isolation, so that longevity has been transmitted and can be traced in their ancestry.
In Abkhazia, however, the genetic factor is less important, for many people over 100 are not only Georgian but also Russian, Jewish, Armenian, and Turkish. Abkhazia is only one of the three Soviet republics that make up the Georgian region: the others are Georgia and Armenia. In this entire region, a great many more old people are found in the mountainous areas than at sea level.
Dr. G.Z. Pitzkhelaur, head of the Gerontological Center in the Republic of Georgia, has reported that the 1970 census placed the number of centenarians for the entire Caucasus between 4,500 and 5,000. In terms of percentages, in Abkhazia almost 3 percent of the population lives to over 100 years of age.
In the Caucasus considerably more milk products (especially yogurt and cheese) are consumed, since they have an active dairy economy; but the cheese is very low in fat content and the total fat intake is only forty to sixty grams per day. This compares with an average American intake of 157 grams daily.
Considering the other factors that enter into longevity, the Abkhazians have no word at all for “old people.” Those who reach and surpass 100 years of age are referred to as “long-living people.” Everyone works hard right up to the day of demise. There is little stress in their lives—although like all the other mountain peoples they work very hard—and competition is unknown.
There is an Abkhazian saying that “without rest, you cannot work: without work, the rest may not give you any benefit.” In addition to hard, physical labor, daily hikes, swimming, and horseback rides are enjoyed even by the old.
In the very first opening words of this book, I quoted Edgar Cayce’s words on life expectancy, which he felt should range in contemporary times from 121 to 150 years of age, and now we find most gerontologists and scientists agreeing with him. Why, then, are we only enjoying a life expectancy of 71.2 years for men (around 76.1 for women), which is higher than it has been but still many years short of our full life potential?
Obviously our lifestyle in the modern Western world falls far short of the youth-perpetuating habits of the mountain people of the Caucasus, Ecuador, and Hunzaland. Nor can we, if we would, all find our own mountain to live on. But we can discipline ourselves to duplicate those elements that make for long years of healthy, disease-free, youthful, vigorous living, and throughout the pages of this book we have been giving you the very secrets and guidelines you need to attain these goals.
When Cayce was asked, “Is it possible for our bodies to be rejuvenated in this incarnation?” he gave this reply:
Possible. For, as the body is an atomic structure, the units of energy around which there are the movements of the atomic forces that—as given—are ever the sentiment or pattern of a universe, as these atoms, as these structural forces are made to conform or to rely upon or to be one with the spiritual import, the spiritual activity, they revivify, they make for constructive forces.
The soul cannot die; for it is of God. The body may be revivified, rejuvenated. And it is to that end it may, the body, transcend the earth and its influence. (262-85) ... for each cell in the atomic force of the body is as a world of its own and each one—each cell—being in perfect unison, may build to that necessary to reconstruct the forces, of the body in all its needs. (93-1)
Remember the body does gradually renew itself constantly. Do not look upon the conditions which have existed as not being able to be eradicated from the system . . . Hold to that knowledge and don’t think of it as just theory—that the body can, the body does renew itself! (1548-3)
Let us pause for a moment now and compare the wisdom of the more primitive way of life and the Cayce concepts with the findings of modern science.
The most popular—at least the most highly publicized—methods of rejuvenation in this century up to now have been based on the work of prominent “youth” doctors, such as Dr. Paul Niehans of Switzerland and Dr. Ana Aslan of Romania. Dr. Niehans, the eminent cell therapist whose famous patients included Konrad Adenauer, Somerset Maugham, and Pope Pius XII, injected his aging patients with the fresh chopped-up embryos of lambs, which are supposed to rejuvenate the organs and cells. Dr. Aslan injects her patients with a procaine mixture.
Both therapists (whose patients swore by the effectiveness of the respective therapies) put them on rigid regimens of no alcohol, no smoking, and no sunbathing (which is very aging, as we pointed out in the chapter on beauty tips).
In addition, Dr. Ana Aslan, when treating patients at her Romanian retreat in Bucharest, retains her patients over a period of time during which they are disciplined and regulated as to diet, exercise, rest, and careful observation. Her T.L.C. (tender, loving care) may explain why Dr. Aslan has gotten better results than other doctors who have tried the procaine treatment on their patients. She also has patients return for “booster” shots—which is what I term “shoulder-tapping”—and it always has a very beneficial effect in sustaining improvement in patients. Dr. Alex Comfort, the eminent British gerontologist, and other scientists have suggested that it is the “care” and attention the patients receive, the added exercise, and the improved diet and rest, rather than the procaine itself that produces the results. We shall have to await the verdict of further research.
Dr. Aslan’s product, Gerovital 3, is now being tested with human patients in clinics in a number of centers in the United States in an effort to obtain licensing for use from the FDA. Such respectable researchers in gerontology and pharmacology as Drs. Josef P. Hrachovec and M. David MacFarlane, scientists at the University of Southern California, and others report that the effective element in the procaine may be something that inhibits monoamine oxidase (MAOI). MAOI is an enzyme that seems to be correlated to depression in people over the age of forty-five and may be one of the elusive villains of the aging process itself—a subject we will discuss in greater detail later in this chapter. Dr. Nathan S. Kline, associate professor of psychiatry at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and director of the research center at Rockland State Hospital, Orangeburg, New York, is coordinating the research on Gerovital 3. However, when and if the drug is licensed it will be as an antidepressant, not as a cure for aging.
Although Dr. Niehans recently died at a ripe old age—in his eighties—(without availing himself of the benefits of his lamb-embryo injections, according to his biographers), his work is being carried on at his Swiss La Prairie Clinic, and other youth doctors have adopted his methods. When others did not achieve the same remarkable results that Dr. Niehans reported, he attributed their failure to the fact that they were using dried instead of fresh-killed material or that they were not doing it properly, or some other reason. The famous novelist Somerset Maugham did recover from senility when he took the treatment and followed the discipline of no smoking or drinking; but the third time he was treated, upon relapsing into his bad smoking and drinking habits, he was not helped at all. Therefore, since cell therapy has not been subjected to the rigid clinical testing that Ana Aslan’s work is now undergoing, it is difficult to pass judgment on it. We don’t know whether it is the lamb embryos or the discipline that helps. One must consider also the charisma of the doctor, which influences the mind and spirit of the patient. And no one who believes in Edgar Cayce’s work would underestimate the value and role of those two elements—for body mind, and spirit are one.
To return to the more prosaic and scientifically based methods of unraveling the mystery of why we age and what causes aging, we find that if current research has not yet found all the answers, at least it has dispelled many misconceptions and turned up some valid clues that can help us cope with the problems of aging until the cure is found.
One of the first misconceptions to be dispelled is that people die of “old age.” Dr. Robert H. Dorenmuehle of Duke University’s Center for Aging says, “People do not die of old age—only disease.”
The late Dr. Edward L. Bortz of Philadelphia’s Lakenhau Hospital, former president of the AMA and the American Geriatrics Society, used to say: “There is no known case of death from old age. No pathologist has ever established at the autopsy table that a person dying of old age (natural causes) had body tissues correct and adequate in every way except that they had worn out in the process of aging. People do not die of old age, they die of diseases which occur with the passing of time. All these are recognizable.”
Theoretically, as mentioned in Chapter 1, it is possible for humans to live forever. Each day our body manufactures trillions of new cells. The only cells that do not reproduce are those of the muscles and the brain. Tumor and cancer cells have been kept alive in laboratory solutions for many years and may be eternal. Cayce, in some of his readings, said that people in biblical times lived up to 1,000 years.
There should be a warning to all bodies as to such conditions; for would the assimilations and the eliminations be kept nearer normal in the human family, the days might be extended to whatever period as was so desired; for the system is builded by the assimilations of that it takes within, and is able to bring resuscitation so long as the eliminations do not hinder. (311-4)
This is right in line with the latest research on aging, which is studying what happens to the cells when a person grows old. When we are on our deathbed, we are full of cells only twenty-four hours old. There is a growing belief among scientists that what happens to the cells that die may contain the secret of aging and mortality, as Cayce suggested in his emphasis on “elimination.”
When young cells are put into a chemical solution, they live and subdivide fifty times—the life span that is programmed into them genetically by the DNA and RNA. When the same cells are put into a deep freeze after twenty subdivisions and then defrosted, they continue to subdivide until they reach their full program of fifty subdivisions. On the other hand, if the cells are taken from an old person, they subdivide from ten to twenty times and then die.
Some geneticists, especially those active in the newly exploding field of molecular biological science, theorize that the life span is programmed into the genes—and that is why long-lived persons come from long-lived parents, grandparents, and ancestors.
Why do fruit flies die in forty days; the mayfly in twenty-four hours; the mouse after three years; the human after seventy years (although one’s normal span should be at least 110 or more years); the turtle at 200 years? The genetic code says, “So much—no more. Like a phonograph record, your song is ended—you are through.”
Other geneticists say no to this fatalistic view. They believe that, like scratches on our life phonograph record or tape, errors occur in the repeated copying of the genetic message and this interferes with the communication of the correct life-giving messages. Dr. Josef P. Hrachovec subscribes to this latter view and says in his book, Keeping Young and Living Longer,3” The human body is designed to function efficiently to an age numbering in three figures. But most people are robbed of achieving this potential by the accumulated effects of a variety of stresses. Permitting these stresses to act upon us day after day, month after month, year after year, comprises the disease-inducing, life-shortening errors which sap our strength and shorten our lives . . . Preventive maintenance functions to allow us to achieve the potential life span past 100 years—that is our birthright.”
Dr. Williams, the biochemical nutritionist, concedes that heredity is important and “may be a serious stumbling block to continued good health and longevity . . . and [a person] may be barred from longevity, provided he eats and lives very much like his neighbors. If, however, by using unusual expedients he can get a suitable assortment of everything his bodily cells need, he may be able to retain a measure of youth until old age, even though initially he may have been handicapped by heredity.”4
Dr. Williams is saying here that we can overcome the obstacle or handicap of heredity. His solution is adequate nutrition.
Dr. Clive M. McKay of Cornell University and his co-workers in experiments carried on as far back as 1932 proved that by underfeeding rats one could increase their life span by 33 percent. The example of the “longevos” of Vilcabamba and the “long-living ones” of Georgia and Hunzaland who live on such a limited-calorie diet would seem to support the theory for humans as well as laboratory rats.
However, Dr. Williams has pointed out that when rats are underfed, they live longer because they mature at a slower pace and later age. “With human beings, underfeeding with good food might result in a delay of maturity (perhaps it would be necessary to raise the voting age to thirty). The social practicality of increasing life span in human beings by underfeeding seems dubious,” he concludes.
Nevertheless, no one disagrees that obesity is a serious threat to longevity and that as one grows older it is wise to cut the intake of calories provided essential nutrients are included. Dr. Nathan Shock of the Gerontology Research Center of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development puts it this way: “If you could suddenly wave a wand and eliminate all the obesity in the population, you’d be more likely to increase life span than by almost any other means.”5 Keeping your weight down reduces the risk of stroke, hypertension, heart attacks, diabetes, and other killers that are on the increase after the age of sixty.
Dr. Denham Harman of the University of Nebraska is pursuing villains called “free radicals”; these produce in cells a heavy deposit of lipofuscin, also known as age pigment. Dr. Harman told a national conference on aging, sponsored by the Huxley Institute on March 6, 1972, that the deposit is “very characteristic of the senile period.” He went on to say that “rather than discuss whether senility and memory loss is a psychiatric or a biochemical problem, for all changes-functional or organic—are basically due to chemical reactions, I should like to consider a possible approach for slowing the rate of degradation in the brain and elsewhere so as to increase our years of healthy, productive life.
“There are two aspects of this problem,” he continued. “One is to slow the rate of degradation (deterioration) of the body as a whole; and two, to be sure that the brain deteriorates in step with or behind the remainder of the body, so that the higher functions are essentially intact until death.”
Dr. Harman cites, as examples, the burning of gasoline and the development of rancidity in butter to illustrate free radical reactions. In humans, this process produces harmful peroxides when lipids (fats) combine with oxygen.
Dr. Harman warns that polyunsaturated lipids (oils), such as those in safflower and corn oils, would be expected to increase the level of free radical reactions as compared with comparable amounts of lard or olive oil. This was confirmed experimentally by feeding mice and rats diets in which the sole source of lipid was lard, olive oil, corn oil, or safflower oil. Increasing the degree of unsaturation of dietary fat caused the animals to die significantly faster.
This bombshell of information directly contradicts all the educational admonitions of medical authorities trying to save us from premature death from heart attacks because of cholesterol-clogged arteries. It seems to leave us on the horns of a most uncomfortable dilemma: either you risk cardiovascular disease and arteriosclerosis from animal (saturated) fats or you court an earlier death because the polyunsaturates combine with oxygen to produce noxious peroxides that will shorten the life of your cells—and yours with it.
However, do not despair. Help is at hand. As Dr. Williams points out in Nutrition Against Disease:6
“Lipid (fat) peroxidation, the formation of harmful peroxides from the interaction between oxygen and highly unsaturated fats (polyunsaturates) needs to be controlled in the body. Both oxygen and the polyunsaturated lipids are essential to our existence, but if the protection against peroxidation is inadequate, serious damage to various body proteins may result.
“Vitamin E is thought to be the leading agent for the prevention of peroxidation and the free radical production which is associated both with it and with radiation. Vitamin E, along with a relatively large number of other antioxidants—ascorbic acid (vitamin C) ubiquinones, sulfhydryl compounds, and the trace element selenium—do their jobs in a complicated manner. They protect the body against the damaging products formed when oxygen reacts directly with the highly unsaturated fatty substances which are essential parts of our metabolic machinery . . .
“As a practical matter, providing plenty of vitamin E and ascorbic acid—both harmless antioxidants—is indicated as a possible means of preventing premature aging.”
Vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, is frequently mentioned in connection with the deterioration and loss of flexibility in the collagen that accounts for the stiffening of joints as we grow older.
“Since ascorbic acid is absolutely essential for the building of healthy collagen,” Dr. Williams advises, “it seems probable that an abundant supply of this vitamin would tend to slow down the form of deterioration which accompanies impaired collagen production.”
Dr. Caleb E. Finch of the University of Southern California is tracking the hypothalamus, deep inside the brain, as the secret aging agent. Dr. Finch has reported that changes in levels of such nerve hormones as noradrenaline coincide with age. He suspects such changes could affect the nearby pituitary gland, the body’s master endocrine regulator, affecting in turn the other endocrine glands throughout the body, including the adrenals, ovaries, and testes. In the future, he suggests, “we ought to be able to take a couple of millimeters of blood from a person, run tests to see what his hormone levels are, then give him a cocktail of juices to remedy some of the imbalances involved in aging.”
There is also the interesting work being done by Dr. Roy L. Walford on the theory that as we grow older, the body’s immune system becomes deranged and the cells of the organism fight themselves, and in fact, the body kills itself.
Dr. Walford has doubled the life span of certain fish by reducing the temperature of its water habitat by five or six degrees. Other researchers agree that this seems to suggest that lowering human body temperature by only a degree or two could add an extra twenty-five to thirty years of life. Just how to do this—by drugs, hibernation, or some other method—still remains to be researched.
Other scientists believe that the cells after a definite number of divisions lose their generative power and kill the whole organism. As the cells deteriorate and lose their quality, waste matter collects in the cell with every division. As this waste collects, it interferes with the chemical process, and the cells begin to make tiny mistakes during the dividing process. The body then develops defense mechanisms against these wastes which, as the body ages, Dr. Walford claims, causes the cells of the organism to fight themselves and in fact kill the body.
When biochemists find a way to eliminate this waste matter from the cell before it damages the chemical process, there will be no reason for the cells to stop dividing forever and thus sustaining eternal life. (Thus far only cancer cells seem capable of eternal life in culture.)
Remember Cayce’s reiterated admonition to cleanse the body—to eliminate in order to regenerate.
Let us see how current Cayce was with contemporary cellular research, when, many, many years ago, he said this:
If a cell is left in the system that should be eliminated, or if it is of that condition of inactivity, then all the cells gathered about it cannot heal that cell. It must produce sufficient of the lymph or leukocyte . . . [to] move it out of the system, to let the new supply take its place! . . .
Just as a comparison ... a rotten apple left in a barrel may make all of these rotten; yet no matter how many sound ones are put about it, the rotten one will never be made sound. (243-7)
While none of us may even want eternal life on this planet, it is encouraging to know that so many scientists are now hard at work to solve the mystery of aging. Indeed, the outlook is very optimistic for extending youthfulness into our middle and later years.
Dr. Bernard L. Strehler, professor of biology and director of biological research and training at the Gerontology Center of the University of Southern California, asks (referring to the process of aging), “Will we someday learn how to turn the switches back on?”
His answer is extremely optimistic. “The way things are going in medical science nowadays, I would not be at all surprised if by the turn of the twenty-first century we have learned how.”
A number of exciting leads were reported at the conference on “The Crisis in Health Care for the Aging,” previously referred to.
Dr. Richard C. Adelman, Ph.D., of the Fels Research Institute and Department of Biochemistry of Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia reported that there is increasing evidence that the immune system “probably exerts a critical influence on growth and that breakdown in biological communication may be responsible not only for cancer and many other diseases but also for aging.”
It thus becomes increasingly clear that the breakthrough in research on aging will probably also solve the mystery of cancer, and vice versa, since the two are closely linked.
Dr. Eleanor A. Jacobs, Ph.D., clinical assistant professor, Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine of the State University of New York at Buffalo, and clinical psychologist at the VA Hospital in Buffalo, reported considerable success in reversing senility and memory loss by feeding oxygen to people under “increased barometric pressure,” in special chambers designed for this purpose. Dr. Edwin Boyle, Jr., research director of the Miami Heart Institute, reported similar success from “immersing [the patient] in pure oxygen at 3 atmospheres of pressure—about the same as 30 pounds of pressure in an automobile tire and the equivalent of diving about 60 feet in scuba gear.” Dr. Boyle concedes that not all patients so treated respond well, but many “were smarter.”
Because the hyperbaric chambers are so expensive and available to only a privileged few, studies are underway on the possibilities of trace-metal metabolism, the biogenic amines, the sulfur-containing amino acids, and the antioxidant vitamins, especially ascorbic acid and vitamin E, which may achieve the same result and become more easily available and distributed.
Other experiments that show promise of being useful in solving the mystery of aging or treating its symptoms and reversing its course are being conducted with DMSO, a membrane penetrant that passes through every tissue of the body except the fingernail and tooth. “DMSO reduces pain by impeding conduction in some of the smaller nerve fibers,” according to Dr. Stanley W. Jacob, associate professor of surgery at the University of Oregon Medical School, who reported on it. It is alleged that it has “anti-inflammatory properties, dissolves scar tissue, improves blood supply and scientists have demonstrated that a patient can actually be fed by dissolving protein, fat, and carbohydrate in DMSO and applying this mixture to the skin.”
It is reported elsewhere that DMSO is a powerful sexual stimulant for the male and that a few drops on the skin can cause even an impotent male to respond with an erection. (This report is unverified and since the compound is not available in this country and has not been licensed by the FDA we have no reliable clinical data on it. It may be an exaggeration, since impotence is compounded of many psychological as well as physiological factors.)
Dr. Alex Comfort, director of the Gerontology Research Group of University College in London, a world-recognized gerontologist, who is better known to American TV audiences and book buyers as the author of The Joy of Sex,7 summarized the entire subject at the conference with such precision and so succinctly that I would like to quote him:
“The average person, asked if he’d like to live to 150 would answer, ‘Hell, no,’ because he knows what he’d be like at 150. We are not trying to prolong life without regard to the quality of what we’re prolonging. What we’re trying to do is prolong adult vigor so that aging happens later.
“Towards this goal, there are a number of fundamental lines of attack. They are all going on now, and they all require more funding to make them go on faster.
“The first is regulative enzymology, the study of why metabolic processes change with age.
“The second is the study of error theory, based on the assumption that there may be failures in the accuracy of bodily copying processes causing faulty development in later years (through the DNA and RNA).
“Third is immunology. Why do immune mechanisms go wrong with age? Do the cops become less effective, or the robbers more numerous, or both? At the moment it seems to be both. In our study of this area there is real chance of an important advance.
“The fourth is the nature of the dietetic effect. Since 1930 we have known we could make mice and rats live 40 percent longer by manipulating the caloric content of the diet (downwards).
“The last line of attack is the antioxidant effect. Dr. Harman has the idea that if the effects of radiation resemble those of aging, antiradiation drugs might slow down natural aging—in particular those drugs which prevent oxidative attack. We do just that in preserving rubber or butter by adding substances called antioxidants which slow down the perishing process.
“So there’s a bevy of ongoing experiments which in three to five years should give us a better idea of the underlying process of aging or at least what it is not.”
While the scientists are deciding why you are aging, it may be important to you to keep as healthy and youthful as possible now with the knowledge and tools at hand. I sincerely believe that everything we have learned from Cayce, tested clinically throughout the years, and reported in the pages of this book, can help you do just that.
All agree on the importance of nutrition in maintaining good health and youthful vigor. In addition to the sound guidelines set forth in Chapter 5 on diet and nutrition, Cayce had a few more useful ideas that are worth heeding on nutrition and aging:
The ordinary conclusions of the activity of Gold, when assimilated, is incorrect—for these feed directly to the tissue of the brain itself, and given properly—silver and gold may almost lengthen life to its double, of its present endurance. (120-5)
Good sources of gold are shellfish, carrots, and oyster plant (salsify), highly regarded by Cayce for all of its mineral properties.
Also there may be obtained from the turtle egg those influences for longevity that may be created in certain cellular forces in the body. (659-1)
In Nutrition Against Disease, Dr. Williams says that “while no one seriously entertains the idea of a philosopher’s stone which will prolong life indefinitely the evidence at hand indicates that well-rounded nutrition, including generous amounts of vitamin C and vitamin E, can contribute materially to extending the healthy life span of those who are already middle aged. The greatest hope for increasing life spans can be offered if nutrition—from the time of prenatal development to old age—is continuously of the highest quality.”8
Dr. Ronald Walker of Surrey University’s Department of Biochemistry, commenting on the work of Dr. Comfort and other researchers who are experimenting with feeding antioxidants in substantial amounts to laboratory animals, warns, “We do not yet know how antioxidants affect such things as loss of bodily functions. We have to be cautious because of potential side effects ... I would recommend that people search out many of the natural foods that contain large amounts of them. The best diet would come from a vegetable source rather than a meat source.”
This advice is certainly consonant with Cayce’s repeated advice to get your nutrients from natural foods rather than pills, except in severe cases of illness.
Dr. Hrachovec, in Keeping Young and Living Longer,9 says that “exercise is the closest thing to an anti-aging pill now available.” Dr. Herbert A. DeVries, who also works at the Gerontology Research Center at U.S.C., has done experiments proving that the changes in function of various organs in the human body that we associate with age are very similar to the changes that can be produced in very young men simply by keeping them inactive.
In Chapters 6 and 7, 1 devoted considerable attention and space to the exercise principle, as well as instruction in specific ones. They can keep you youthful, fit, healthy, and vigorous throughout the years. I would like to remind “youtheners” of the special value to you of the Cayce cat, pelvic circle, and head-and-neck exercises that are all good stimulants for the glands. Also take note of the bicycle-riding to control and avoid incontinence. Cayce included exercise as part of essential therapy in almost 1,400 readings, and I can say from my own personal experience that exercise has kept me fit so that now in my eightieth year I can still outwork most of my younger students, standing on my feet all day and giving manipulation to patients.
Cayce and I have always been strong advocates of the benefits for men of colonics, sitz baths, and breach-beating as a protection from and treatment for prostatitis. I have used these therapies with repeated success on older patients and they are also equally effective preventive measures. Cayce believed that a man who took a colonic every month would never have this trouble common to aging males. Instructions for colonics (or enemas) are to be found in Chapter 11, and also instructions for sitz baths. Breach-beating, which is percussion massage on the buttocks, is described in Chapter 8, on massage and manipulation.
Cayce was much preoccupied with the glandular system and attributed great importance to the pituitary when Gray’s Anatomy was describing it as something of no use after the first years of growth. Cayce also attributed much importance to the Peyer’s patches—a series of aggregated lymph nodules in the lining of the small intestine.
Dr. William McGarey relates in one of the medical research bulletins that Allan Goldstein, director of the Biochemistry Division of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, reported that thymosin levels in the blood decrease dramatically with age—“significantly between twenty-five to forty-five years of age.” Thymosin is a hormone produced by the thymus gland, and Goldstein found that injecting this hormone into mice increased their immunity and resistance to disease. The thymus gland is the master of the immune system and it has been known for years that cells from the thymus migrate to other portions of the body (such as to the Peyer’s patches) and become centers of lymphatic activity.
Peyer’s patches are best marked in the young, become indistinct in middle age, and sometimes disappear altogether in advanced life. The Cayce readings suggest that these patches tend to become fewer in number as the body grows weaker and that the regular use of castor oil packs over the abdomen tends to rejuvenate these glands and thus serve as a major factor in the rejuvenation of the entire body.
When there is over-exercise physically, or especially the mental forces as of worry or anxiety, to be sure it calls on the necessity of these emunctory activities—or those patches that are called by a man’s name [Peyer’s patches]. These are then lessened in their number and thus make a quickening or an anxiety, causing the flow of blood in the heart ... to dilate. (294-212)
Now in the physical forces of the body (as seen and understood, in the nervous systems of the body) there are those glands that secrete fluids which in the circulation sustain and maintain the reaction fluid in the nerve channels themselves. (271-5)
Dr. McGarey goes on to explain that “merging all these bits of information together, one might say that lack of tensions, or not being able to handle them properly might be directly related to the number of Peyer’s patches present in one’s body, which in turn could well have a strong influence on how one lives. Castor oil packs, one might postulate, could well have an influence on the length of one’s life.”
The human being is more than a body, and a program for adding years to one’s life and life to one’s years must consider many other factors. Most of my former patients and clients who lived or who are living into their eighties and nineties have been active and working at their business or professions. David Dubinsky, in his eighties, was able to beat off a youthful mugger; Bob Hope, in his seventies, looks as good as he did when he worked out at Reilly’s, and in an interview he confessed he has had to wage the “battle of the bulge” against overweight all of his life. Hard work and exercise, temperate eating, and challenge keep him going.
Gloria Swanson is noted for her crusades for better, natural, and purer food. Her mental attitude, expressed in an interview with Mrs. Brod some years ago for the Philadelphia Bulletin, is a good Rx for youthfulness for all. “Never grow old—grow up,” she told Mrs. Brod. Former Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller attributes his youthful vigorous good health and stamina to heredity (his father lived to eighty-six and his grandfather to ninety-eight). He has never smoked, drinks only aperitif wine, never has weighed more than fifteen pounds more at his highest point from his lowest point during an exhausting political campaign, tries to hike, horseback ride, and play golf in the open, and finally he attributes a great deal to his personal osteopath, Dr. Kenneth Riland.
The Cayce-Reilly Blueprint for Longevity
1. Health maintenance.
2. Balance of mental and physical activities.
3. Emotional discipline.
4. Striving for ego expression through challenge.
5. Motivation for useful living.
6. Giving and receiving love and friendship.
7. Intelligent adaptation, such as adjusting to one’s financial condition.
“I see Dr. Kenneth Riland about twice a week,” Mr. Rockefeller wrote me. “This is the best possible preventive medicine and keeps one relaxed, which is very important in face of the pressures and responsibilities of public life.
“I am also convinced that health and vitality depend as much on one’s state of mind as on the state of body. I am intensely interested in what I do. I thrive on solving problems. Philosophically, I am an incorrigible optimist and finally, my whole outlook is conditioned by a positive religious faith that was instilled in me by devout and loving parents from childhood.”
Rockefeller concluded, “Good health is basically sensible living and purposeful living—which are, in my judgment, the best medicines ever compounded.”
I think enough has been said in all the foregoing pages to guide you on proper health maintenance and balance of physical and mental activity. In addition to exercise, I would like to add the importance of having a sense of humor. Abraham Lincoln once said, “With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I didn’t laugh, I should die.” Mahatma Gandhi said, “If I had no sense of humor I would long ago have committed suicide.”
One also must maintain a proper perspective on the troubles large and small that plague us all our lives. As people get older, they should have more wisdom and better judgment. The trouble is that most of them become toxic and, as a result, become irritable rapidly. One must watch that irritation. “No” has a much more detrimental effect on an older person than it has on a younger one. One way to offset this is to have a good philosophy of living-just project yourself a hundred years from now and you won’t have anything to worry about. The Irish have an expression I like: “A hundred years to back it—you can’t tell which were the bones that wore the ragged jacket.”
The Chinese also have a wise saying: “The power that people have to hurt me, I give them.” It is a good maxim to remember when things start piling up on you.
So much for emotional discipline and balance. Now we come to the concept of “challenge” and motivation for useful living.
Dr. Roy M. Hamlin, a research psychologist at the Danville, Illinois, Veterans Administration Hospital, completed a study that shows that people live for as long as they feel needed. “If the older individual has a need for the years beyond seventy, he will retain competence and live longer,” Dr. Hamlin reports.
Justice William O. Douglas, in an article titled “Towards Greater Vitality,” says, “Vitality thrives on challenge, provided there is hope.”10
One does not have to climb mountains as Justice Douglas does, for challenge can be found anywhere. In our own small community, we have Pat Curran, a man who retired from the Mobil Oil Company after forty years and came to live here. First he winterized his summer cottage and when that challenge was completed, he became active with the Golden Age Club of Milton, New Jersey. In a short time he galvanized all of its members into volunteering for every conceivable kind of civic, church, and charitable activity. He has organized trips and recreation that keeps those golden-agers hopping physically and mentally.
“We took a bus ride to the Amish country,” Mr. Curran told Mrs. Brod, “and that made a twelve-hour day that would be taxing for someone in their thirties. Our people are in their late sixties, seventies, and eighties. The average seventy or eighty year old sits in a rocking chair, dozing off, growing older every minute. Not this group. It is the zest for life, the desire for life, and the drive that count. We have sick people, too, but they get out with the others and forget their aches and pains. When one of our ladies fell getting on a bus and cut her leg, the accident showed us that we had to learn something about first aid and carry a first-aid kit with us—so we all took the course.
“One of the things I try to do with these people is to instill a lot of confidence and self-respect and dignity into their lives,” Mr. Curran went on. “As a general rule the older you get the more you are shunted aside.”
There is a full-scale revolt against this shunting aside by society brewing in the country today. Groups like the AARP (the American Association of Retired Persons) and the Grey Panthers are mobilizing to change the compulsory retirement laws and bring about other reforms that will enable healthy, vital people to continue to function in the mainstream of society.
Dr. Wendell M. Swenson of Mayo Clinic and the Mayo Foundation comments on the confusion that exists today within the science of psychology concerning the gerontic abilities of humans. “It was not long ago that psychology courses taught that man’s intellectual capacity achieved a peak at about the age eighteen to twenty years and that, after this, his mental powers tended to decline or deteriorate first in small degree, but later rather considerably and rapidly. But recent studies, particularly those serial evaluations of intellectual capacity during advancing age carried out at the University of California, have shown that this view is not particularly true. The data are significant in that studies of a large number of persons from college age until the age of fifty to fifty-five years, with the same tests, demonstrated virtually no changes in intellectual capacity.”11
There is no reason why people should retire at fifty-five or sixty years of age if they are healthy and wish to continue in active employment.
However, until that day of change comes, it is important “not to retire,” but to change activities—even if they are nonpaid, voluntary ones.
Finally, follow the advice of Cayce, who in answer to the question, “How can I best prepare for old age?” replied thusly:
By preparing for the present. Let age only ripen thee. For one is ever just as young as the heart and the purpose. Keep sweet. Keep friendly. Keep loving, if ye would keep young. (3420-1)
DR. HAROLD J. REILLY was founder-director of the Reilly Health Institute in Rockefeller Center. For many years he worked personally with Edgar Cayce, applying treatments recommended in Cayce’s psychic readings. More than 3,000 physicians have referred patients to him or his institute for treatment.
RUTH HAGY BROD is a syndicated columnist, foreign correspondent, and author of a number of books, including Ena Twigg: Medium.