Category Archives: Health

Health, Science And Society

Vitamin D

Well, this is certainly counterintuitive:

“We found that the offspring of nonagenarians who had at least 1 nonagenarian sibling had lower levels of vitamin D than controls, independent of possible confounding factors and SNPs [single nucleotide polymorphisms] associated with vitamin D levels,” write the authors. “We also found that the offspring had a lower frequency of common genetic variants in the CYP2R1 gene; a common genetic variant of this gene predisposes people to high vitamin D levels.

These findings support an association between low vitamin D levels and familial longevity.” They postulate that offspring of nonagenarians might have more of a protein that is hypothesized to be an “aging suppressor” protein. More research is needed to understand the link between lower vitamin D levels, genetic variants and familial longevity.

Of course, correlation is not causation. For now, I think I’ll continue to supplement.

Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Speaking Of Paleo Diets

2 Comments

Best wishes to Charlie Martin. I predict it will work.

For what it’s worth, my dad died at fifty-five, a third of a century ago, in large part due to criminal dietary advice (OK, maybe that’s a little too strong — they probably knew no better) and my mother at sixty-eight to a massive heart attack in the night, in her sleep. At least for her, it was fast. And in both cases they were overweight smokers, a product of their generation.