Podcast 085: Antioxidants and Anti-aging

Oxidative stress, caused by over-abundance of stressors, of oxidative agents, and by deficiency of auto-oxidants is what causes the external and internal signs of aging. The weathered look of smokers or people who get too much sunshine exposure is visible on the outside. Your organs are being damaged in a similar manner on the inside.

Dr. Flanagan worked on Hunza water trying to isolate and synthesize its properties. He was able to work on the original 40 year old Hunza sample because the local water is not as pure as it was when the original research was done. Dr. Flanagan was eventually able to create the same anomalies in water but it wasn’t stable. As soon as the water was shaken or stirred, it lost the properties – unlike the original Hunza water sample which still retained its qualities even when shaken.

Patrick Flanagan took his process further and was able to dry the nano-colloids into a powder that could be combined with other supplements and when this is done, their absorbability increases by about 300%. The product is now available as Megahydrate by Phi Sciences.

Podcast 085: Antioxidants and Anti-aging

This is the Life Enthusiast co-op podcast Restoring Vitality to You and to the Planet. Let’s join our host Scott Paton and Martin Pytela now.

Scott: Welcome back everybody you’re listening to the life enthusiast co-op podcast restoring vitality to you and to the planet. I’m your co-host Scott Paton along with Martin Pytela, hey Martin how are you doing today?

Martin: I’m doing good, just sitting here quietly rusting away.

Scott: Well we have been talking about all sorts of things to do with the health education on the life Enthusiast website on the podcasts which is at www.life-enthusiast.com and really there are four parts to being healthy and the first part is cleansing and the second part is nutrition and the third part is the pH balance and the fourth part is our vibration and now of course what we are going to be doing in our upcoming podcasts is going to breaking that stuff down into smaller bite sized chunks because each one of those parts there is just so much to it. We have talked about algae and amino acids and some aging issues and functional medicine and today what we are going to be talking about are antioxidants because really it’s gone beyond a buzz word to a cliché that’s because of this and because of that and of course you go into any grocery store and they have a whole wall of bottles and pills for us to look at some, some are tropical flavored or pill form or some are capsules or some are time released or some are this or some are that. I think there is a huge industry there that maybe taken for a little bit of a ride Martin.

Martin: I’m not so sure that taken for a ride is a good expression, I mean you can certainly pay too much what you should know is that antioxidants are very important. As we discussed functional medicine oxidative stress was one of the five all important topics and oxidative stress shows on your body as for instance wrinkles visualize a person who has been drinking and smoking for many years and compare him to someone who is much younger or to someone who is not drinking or smoking. The difference you will see is on their face and on their skin and the difference will be totally obvious. So what you see there is the oxidative damage and antioxidants will prevent that. What’s that all about right?

Scott: I guess the first question is what are antioxidants?

Martin: Well I guess antioxidants prevent oxidation.

Scott: So anything that prevents rust.

Martin: Right because converting of the pure iron or steel you have the Fe and you turn it into Fe2O3 which is the oxidated iron, rust. This happens everywhere you oxidize aluminum and you oxidize everywhere else I mean your wiper blades will become brittle and they will stop functioning properly because they lose their flexibility because they have oxidated, became cross-linked. because the sun and the rain has caused the damage and same goes for the human body. If there is an abundance of prevention of excessive oxidization you will stay younger longer. Here is the problem; if you completely prevent oxidization you will kill yourself because all energy exchange is an oxidation and reduction. I mean I have I have to oxidize the food I eat in order to take the energy out of it. Think of it this way a carbohydrate or something like sugar or starch and that is composed of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen and what comes out of you is carbon dioxide so the carbon and oxygen are leaving your body and the hydrogen is retained and the hydrogen that is the ultimate in the antioxidants.

Scott: So can you just explain that a little bit more Martin, the hydrogen is the ultimate in the antioxidants?

Martin: It would be yes because the hydrogen is the simplest form of the physical and chemical existence. You have one proton at the center and one electron in the orbit so if you have.

Scott: I’m always thinking that if you have antioxidants it’s like vitamin C which is why I’m trying to get my head around what you are talking about here.

Martin: Okay so antioxidants is this, you have an extra electron in the valance layer that is completely willing to give itself away to some other element that is missing an electron in their valance level so the oxidating agent is someone that is hungry for the electron and the antioxidant is someone who has the electron ready to give.

Scott: Right and that takes up into the molecular or atomic level of this.

Martin: Yes molecular and sub molecular ionic at this point and so this is where we humans are somewhat like the stars. Think of the sun, it has a huge store of hydrogen and it is burning up the hydrogen and it is converting it into helium and here we are essentially taking in light which has been converted by plants into carbohydrates and we are ingesting those and exhaling carbon dioxide and inhaling the oxygen that the plants put out and they retain hydrogen that comes with it and we use that hydrogen as fuel for the furnace that is inside of ourselves.

Scott: That is a great way of looking at it, we are all little stars.

Martin: Yeah that’s it.

Scott: I had never actually heard that expression before, that’s wonderful.

Martin: I think I only came up with it ten minutes ago, what we want to know is what is this big deal with antioxidants.

Scott: How can we get them?

Martin: Right so they come packaged with the antioxidants so you have both the fuel which you are going to be burning with the help of oxygen and yet at the same time you need to cool it with the antioxidant because you know you are oxidating which is sort of like burning but at the same time you need to prevent the fire from burning you down. It’s sort of like having a hot potato and throwing it from one hand to the other that is sort of like the process of the furnace inside the human cell. You know you have a fire inside but you are trying to contain it somehow. So it is a constant battle between the oxidation and the prevention of too much of oxidation.

Scott: Yeah like you said it’s a balance, I just repeated what you said that it’s a balance of two aspects of what is going on.

Martin: Right so you have energy, you’re an athlete and you want to run you have to have fuel to burn and oxygen to burn it with but as you are burning it you are actually increasing the temperature, you are heating the fire, you are heating the engine so now you have to have antioxidants that are going to actually prevent it from self combusting.

Scott: Yeah and that’s quite important.

Martin: Yes so what do we do, how do we get the right kind of antioxidants in? We need to have a broad range of them like vitamin C that is water soluble; it lasts in your body for only four hours. If you take vitamin C in the morning by lunch time it is all gone out of your body which is why you can’t just take one a day that is the ultimate nonsense that the supplement industry has put on people that you can actually take one a day.

Scott: It can’t happen.

Martin: Especially not with the vitamin C even if it’s buffered even if it’s the time release and all of that like slow release it slows down and just maybe we can stretch it from 2 hours to four hours but I can promise you if you take that supplement in the morning there is none of it left by the evening. If you are going to put yourself into an oxidative situation in the evening such as a smoky bar combined with a few glasses of alcohol over top of your fried fish and chips it may sound great but you are going to oxidate like crazy. You need to have protection, so the antioxidants or fats are fat soluble vitamins which are A, D, E and K so any fried food you better load up on vitamin E to protect yourself and vitamin A to protect your inner organs. Without vitamin A you go blind soon and so it goes vitamin B gets depleted with stress, the more stress in your life the more you need to supplement it and you need to supplement it in a way that time release or evenly spaced. You need to take a teaspoon of super food in the morning and then another one after lunch. You can’t just take it all in the morning and say I am healthy now and then hit yourself with this beautiful session of oxidating stress in the evening.

Scott: That actually is just common sense if you think about it we don’t eat breakfast and not eat for the rest of the day. It makes sense that you are always giving your body the nutrition that it wants and I really like the analogy of the body rusting because when I grew up I always saw these cars rusting and just the elements breaking down the steel and whatever else was in the car and I notice a lot fewer cars rusting today. It strikes me and I think people are living healthier and longer then in my youth too so it seems to me that we can do things to slow down this aging process or rusting.

Martin: Of course we can and this is where the famous study of the Hunsa people comes into play.

Scott: Who are the Hunsa?

Martin: Well it was over a hundred years ago and some travelers arrived in this valley, the Hunsa valley and it’s between the borders of Pakistan and China and India, you have the Nagger valley on one side and the Hunsa valley on the other side sort of North of Islamabad.

Scott: So we are talking right up in the Himalayas? Or right beside the Himalayas?

Martin: Yeah right up right there where all the terrible fighting is now going on, right where all the terrorists are hiding in there in the hills. Anyway up there is this valley I don’t remember who it was that found them the first but many researchers from the west traveled there and found these people were long living. They were 120 and 130 years old you know the men were still having children at 100 years old and women were giving birth at age 75 plus.

Scott: That’s amazing.

Martin: Yeah so what was that so the secret was in the water. It was the water that they were drinking. A whole lot of research was done and one successful research was done in France where a fellow whose name is Vincent statistically assembled the health records of different villages then went and measured the relative hydrogen content of the waters and he found that the villages that had abundant negative ion present were healthy and the ones that was lacking antioxidative properties of the hydrogen were way more sick. He actually established a scale from 40 to 0, 20 being neutral and what he found was that the villages that had really healthy populations had water at the level of 21 or 22.

Scott: So just a little bit better then neutral then?

Martin: So these waters had excess hydrogen that was able to be used in the body to keep the oxygenation under check and so the research, there was this Romanian researched known as doctor
Coanda and he worked on it for many years I think 40 years and didn’t figure it out. I mean he had the original samples of the Hunsa water and tried to replicate it and tried to duplicate it and never came up with it. Then he handed it over to Patrick Flannagan who worked on it and he finally had some sort of a breakthrough and figured it out and Patrick created a product that we call micro hydrate which later was named to mega H and then H minus. We actually have that product available and that is the universal antioxidant and when you drink water enriched with the mega H or H minus you are completely overcoming any oxidative stress within the body.

Scott: That sounds like an important thing to do if you want to live long.

Martin: Yes if you want to prevent rusting or the oxidative damage that we described earlier the sort of old leather look of the smoking and drinking types. Now what is also recently coming to popularity are water ionizers. Water ionizers will also provide you with a tool that will remove the highly oxidative elements out of your body. They do this through the artificial split in the water, alkaline water on one side and acidic water on the other side and you drink the alkaline water and you wash with the acidic water because your surface, your skin benefits from the negative ionization and your insides benefit from the positive ionization.

Scott: Well that makes sense.

Martin: And we actually have something in the precious prills you remember we talked about those a few times and the prills they do the same thing as the water ionizer just not as much or they do something like what the Hunsa water is like or what the H minus will provide. So for people who have the economic means to do the best and do well a bottle of H minus is about thirty dollars a month, if you can’t afford that you can at least have a bag of Prills which will cost you fifteen dollars and will last you several years. At least with that you are protected.

Scott: That is absolutely fascinating Martin so if someone wanted to know more because I know you have a lot of articles and a lot of information on this topic because I know it is very close to your heart where would people go to find out more about this?

Martin: Well here we are discussing health education antioxidants and we have just talked over one of the articles and we could get into some of the other ones, for example how coenzyme Q10 protects your hard working muscles or dark chocolate and how it keeps you from becoming oxidized.

Scott: We will have to talk about those in a future podcast for sure.

Martin: I’m sure people are just sitting on the edge of their seats just wanting to know how chocolate is good for them.

Scott: I know I am.

Martin: Well it’s the flavonoids and that is actually what makes all of the superfoods good, flavonoids are all the antioxidant type of molecules that are in all these different seeds. I mean chocolate after all is just the seed to a plant so enjoy the superfoods in the natural splendor because we humans don’t know best because isolating individual elements is not the right way to go, isolated vitamin C or isolated vitamin B3 or B6 even though it’s important is not the whole answer if you are taking bioflavooid in the form of citrus fruits or in the form of schisandra or acerola cherry or something like that it’s all combined not just the water soluble vitamin C but the fat soluble vitamin C together with a supporting cast of characters that are required to make the whole thing work.

Scott: That was kind of the point I was making in the beginning when we would get these vitamin C pills, kind of like if you have an alphabet with no vowels or an alphabet with no consonants.

Martin: Well the Hawaiians made a language out of it. All the same the point is that it is impossible to have a healthy body by trying to take all these extruded concentrates in the hopes of making it all work. There was an experiment done in the 80’s by Dirk Pearson and Sandy Shaw called, it had to do with life extension and I think it was called mega vitamin therapy and they would take huge doses of certain antioxidants and in the end they just abandoned it because it just doesn’t work. The stuff that really works properly is what nature or god or whatever you want to call the Creator has presented. We are not meant to try and outsmart it we are supposed to work with it.

Scott: That seems like a really good point to end this episode on Martin, highly philosophical and hopefully giving everybody something to think about.

Martin: Right okay folks eat natural, drink water and don’t overdo it, moderate everything.

Scott: Get plenty of sleep.

Martin: Don’t drink alcohol unless you want to age faster.

Scott: Don’t smoke and if you want to know more about your health and how to slow down the aging process and all those things you can head over to www.life-enthusiast.com and Martin if somebody actually wanted to speak to you personally about their health concerns how would they do that?

Martin: I’m available on the telephone, my direct line is 775-299-4661 and the company number is 1-866-543-3388 and we are open about twelve hours a day and I am looking forward to hearing from people.

Scott: And if you want to listen to more of our podcast episodes you can go to LifeEnthusiast.podomatic.com they are all archived there for you and they are full of information.

Martin: Okay folks we are closing out for the day this is Life Enthusiast co-op restoring vitality to you and to the planet. Good-bye.

Author: Martin Pytela