Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.

--W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1966), British author

The stresses and strains of everyday life--large and small, physical and emotional--take a continuous toll on your body. Renewal must go on constantly just to keep pace.

If your body's healing system does not have access to the nutritional building blocks it needs precisely when it needs them, the Renewal process breaks down. This, in turn, accelerates aging.

You can see why providing your body with abundant supplies of nutrients is so important. The combination of eating healthful foods--foods of plant origin, which are rich in essential nutrients, antioxidants, and phytochemicals--and taking nutritional supplements guarantees efficient cellular protection, repair, and replacement. This is what you need to slow and reverse aging.

A State of Constant Change

In your body's fragile economy, nutrient supply and demand can fluctuate considerably from one day to the next. For starters, your diet varies, which means that your nutrient intake varies. Then, too, your body's needs change. It may require more of a given nutrient one day, less the next.

I'll use myself as an example. On days when I see patients in my office, I take extra B-complex vitamins, because they are depleted by stress. If I'm planning to write or to give a lecture, I'll scarf extra vitamin B₁₂, ginkgo, ginseng, acetyl-L-carnitine, phosphatidylserine, and pregnenolone to give my brain a boost. (You'll learn more about these and other "neuronutrients" in chapter 29.) When I have to spend time in the smoggy city, I increase my doses of antioxidants, including carotenoids and other phytochemicals, coenzyme Q₁₀, garlic, ginseng, and vitamins C and E. These nutrients scavenge the cell-damaging free radicals produced by air pollution.

It would be wonderful if the human body came equipped with a device that could monitor levels of all of the important nutrients and sound an alarm when any ran dangerously low. Then you could just replenish those that had fallen to suboptimum levels. Unfortunately, even scientists armed with computers have found this task impossible. As yet, you have no way of anticipating what your body's demand for each nutrient might be on any given day, much less correlating this information with an intake. You can only guess.

Because of the daily changes in nutrient supply and demand, your best bet is to err on the side of slight excess. Having a little extra of any nutrient won't harm you. But a brief deficiency can, and a prolonged one will.

Supplementation at Optimum Daily Allowance levels can protect you against deficiencies, even on those days when your body's nutrient demands are high or your nutrient intake is iffy. This way, you can be certain that your body always has enough of the nutritional raw materials it needs to administer the Renewal process.

Nutritional Teamwork

Nutrients are specialists. Each performs a specific set of tasks within your body, sustaining life by supporting cellular protection, repair, and replacement. Running low on any one nutrient is like running your car with a spark plug missing: The internal machinery can function, but not nearly as efficiently as when all of the parts are in place.

This raises an important point. Even though nutrients have distinct assignments, they very much depend upon one another to do their jobs. One nutrient becomes more effective in the context of others, creating a network of mutually beneficial interactions. Only by working together can nutrients dramatically slow the aging process. In Renewal, the whole is truly greater than the sum of the parts.

Because nutrients work synergistically, a deficiency of even one impairs the functioning not only of the systems dependent on it but of the entire metabolic milieu. It's like an orchestra performing without its cello section: The rest of the musicians play their parts, but somehow the symphony sounds incomplete. Likewise, an undernourished body can carry on, but its performance would amount to the biochemical equivalent of cacophony: accelerated aging.

Disrupted Production

For Renewal to function efficiently, your body requires a continuous supply of about 50 nutrients--none of which it can make for itself. These nutrients support the synthesis of chemicals that your cells need to survive.

To better understand just what happens, imagine your body as a manufacturing plant with tens of thousands of production lines. Each line is responsible for making a certain chemical. It does this by executing a series of reactions, using nutrients as its raw materials.

If a line doesn't have enough of a certain nutrient, the corresponding reaction cannot proceed. Production grinds to a halt until the nutrient is restocked. Biochemists refer to the interrupted reaction as a rate-limiting step.

If a rate-limiting step is short-lived, it affects only a few cells. That's not so bad. If a nutrient remains out of stock for a long time, or if it repeatedly runs out, however, trillions of cells will be affected. That's very bad.

A chronic nutrient deficiency undermines health and promotes degenerative disease, although the symptoms may not appear for many years. Running low on beta-carotene, for instance, opens the door to most types of cancer. A shortage of calcium depletes bone mass, which eventually leads to osteoporosis. Too little folic acid precipitates heart attacks and, in women, cervical dysplasia (the development of precancerous cervical cells). A depleted supply of selenium weakens the immune system.

Age Is an Issue

The high price paid for suboptimum nutrition rises with age. As you get older, your body's nutrient needs continue to increase. Yet meeting these needs grows ever more difficult.

Once you hit your forties, your gastrointestinal tract begins losing its absorptive power. Fewer of the nutrients in the foods you eat actually make their way into your bloodstream. This poses a significant problem for people age 50 and over, whose bodies are demanding more nutrients but absorbing less. In fact, it is a chief contributor to the chronic degenerative diseases common in our older population.

Other physical changes associated with aging serve only to aggravate circumstances. For instance, the body's production of digestive enzymes, which are responsible for breaking down food, gradually declines. And cumulative free radical damage to the cells of the intestinal lining further compromises nutrient absorption.

Diminished nutrient absorption means reduced nutrient levels in organs and tissues, which in turn means accelerated degeneration--that is, rapid aging. To bring the problem full circle, when the gastrointestinal tract receives less nourishment, it becomes even less able to absorb nutrients efficiently. It's a vicious circle, and it accelerates each time around.

You want to start protecting your gastrointestinal tract now, so it serves you as well later on in life as it has thus far. Think about it: All of the other organs and systems in your body depend upon the gastrointestinal tract for their nutrient supplies. If your digestive equipment isn't working properly, the rest of your body suffers as well.

Aging brings dietary changes, too. Appetite often declines with advancing years. Eating habits deteriorate as well, as food shopping and meal preparation become more burdensome.

All of these factors conspire to create serious nutrient deficiencies in older people. Faced with ever-decreasing nutrient supplies and ever-increasing nutrient demands, their bodies struggle to continue Renewal. But the deficiencies prove to be too much, causing rapid cellular degeneration and speeding up the aging process.

Of course, just by taking supplements, you can protect yourself against nutrient deficits as you get older. Supplementation helps in two ways. First, it raises your nutrient intakes to Optimum Daily Allowance levels, so you're unlikely to experience any shortages. Second, it keeps your gastrointestinal tract healthy, so nutrients are efficiently absorbed.

A Smart Move for Any Body

You're never too old to start taking supplements. But since they can do your body so much good, why wait?

Diet alone can't satisfy your body's nutrient needs. The standard American diet--high in fat, low in fiber and nutrients--is especially inadequate, leaving cells feeble, flimsy, and fragile. In such a weakened state, they're unable to muster resistance to disease or slow the aging process.

Daily supplementation provides powerful protection against age-accelerating deficiencies by supplying all of the nutritional building blocks that your body requires. It also enriches your internal biochemical soup, increasing nutrient bioavailability and facilitating the complex set of biochemical reactions that we call life. When you sustain this nurturing environment for a long period of time--months, years, even decades--each and every cell in your body becomes healthier. What's more, cells conceived and nourished in this soup make robust replacements for those that are injured or die.

These new, supercharged cells are eager to work, and they can perform their specialized functions at peak efficiency. Nerve cells transmit messages better, intestinal cells digest and transport nutrients better, immune cells protect against cancer, allergies, and infections better. Each of the 100 trillion cells in your body does its job with greater ease and effectiveness. Together, they translate to a healthier, longer-lived you.

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Even though supplements have proven themselves effective in protecting health and promoting longevity, they're still viewed with skepticism by many in the medical community. Why the controversy? The next chapter offers some answers.