Can a supplement boost the powerhouse of cells in your body?
I’m talking about strengthening the mitochondria of your cells. They take food and convert it into energy.
At a cellular level you are fed by adenosine triphosphate (ATP). This is what the cell uses for energy, and the mitochondria is vital for this process.
I won’t make you relive your high school biology class, but this function is what we are interested in.
Scientists theorize that damaged mitochondria are what determines our biological age. When this is worn out, we are done.
When mitochondria become dysfunctional, we get the long-term debilitating diseases such as diabetes, heart failure and Alzheimer’s.
Even though we may have aged and even damaged our mitochondria, what if this could be reversed?
The journal Nature recently published an article with that promise with a supplement known as pyrroloquinoline quinone or PQQ.
While many manufacturers of various supplements make radical promises, when Nature publishes an article, you should really take notice. It is a highly respectable journal that goes to great lengths to make sure authors are doing good science.
In 2010, the Journal of Biological Chemistry published a study claiming that PQQ could restore mitochondria. But now this signal has been amplified by an even larger rodent study.
How does this work? Back to your biology class. CREB (cAMP-response element-binding protein) is vital to your health. It is what causes life. It regulates inflammation and causes growth and protects your DNA from damage.
PQQ is the signaling protein that allows CREB to do its thing effectively.
In short, CREB is what increases the number of mitochondria in your cells. PQQ is what increases CREB.
SMARTER MICE
It’s where it signals that may be most important. The signaling protein that PQQ signals seems to work the most in the brain.
This is what the Nature article looked at.
The mice in the experiment started going down hill on their maze skills as they aged.
The scientists basically gave the mice dementia to speed up the process by giving them D-gal which speed up the oxidation of the brain and that increased the oxidative stress of their entire body.
The PQQ reversed all of this in the mice.
The mice got smarter and behaved like younger mice.
The damage caused by D-gal reversed.
The scientists looked into the cellular health of the mice and found that all the damage they had inflicted was at least partially reversed.
That’s what makes this supplement so exciting. If what happened to the mice happens in humans, then we have a supplement that makes us younger at the cellular level.
You can’t supplement your way out of a bad diet and lifestyle, but this supplement does have great promise to reverse some of the damage done by time and oxidative stress.
PQQ is available online from a number of suppliers. There isn’t a standard dose, though the chemical is not considered toxic, several sources recommend around 20 mg a day as a supplement.
Not only does it seem to help improve brain function, it also helps people sleep better.
While it is often easy to dismiss many claims by various health supplement manufacturers, when the journal Nature starts to take notice about the promise of a supplement, we all should start looking more into it too.
