Another important test I’ve told you about is for homocysteine, a toxic amino acid produced normally in the body. Elevated homocysteine levels are strongly associated with heart disease and stroke. But now were finding that it causes even more problems.
The long-running Framingham study has now linked elevated homocysteine to a doubled risk of Alzheimers for those with the highest levels. And a Netherlands study has linked homocysteine to a two-to-four times elevated risk of osteoporosis.
Homocysteine damages mitochondria, the furnaces that generate energy in your body. Their injury can directly accelerate cell death and aging.
Action to Take: (1) Please get your homocysteine levels checked. If it is 10.0 or greater, then consider the treatments in #2 and #3 below.
(2) A Harvard professor reports lowered homocysteine levels in those with good lifestyle habits, including quitting (or never starting) smoking, exercising, and reducing alcohol consumption. This is the first place to start, along with a good diet. Plus it is free.
(3) Get plenty of folic acid, vitamins B6 and B12 (especially), and betaine (found in beets), which help rid your body of unwanted homocysteine. When bread and cereal makers added folate (which is a salt of folic acid) to their flour in 1996 to combat birth defects, it dropped neural tube defects by 20 percent. But it also dropped mortality from stroke and heart disease. Researchers estimate that folic acid added to food led to 31,000 fewer deaths from stroke between 1998 and 2001. In those same years, it also saved 17,000 from heart disease.
It makes sense to get plenty of folic acid from your diet and supplements. However, I am not a fan of flour. There are far better ways to get folic acid; the best is in fresh vegetables. You can also get it in B-complex supplements and most multivitamins. Healthy Resolves Max Plus has ample amounts of all the B-vitamins. I recommend you take at least 800 mcg of folic acid, 100 mg of vitamin B6, and 100 mg of vitamin B12 daily.
Ref: Dembner, Alice. Diseases of Aging Tied to Amino Acid, New York Times Syndicate, May 18, 2004; Associated Press, March 8, 2004.