NITRIC OXIDE (Stop: if you know anything about nitric oxide, drop down to the comments or send me a separate note telling me what you know. Otherwise, I am going to assume that no one knows any more about nitric oxide than I knew before the year 2022 came upon us.)
Otherwise or there after, follow through the rest of this post with me. This could be the most interesting thing you have ever or will ever learn about. I said recently that my primary or secondary interest in life was going to be the destruction of the thing we have always called AGING. I have been maintaining that aging was just an empty word that we have chosen to indicate growing old. But what is THAT?: growing old? Aren’t we just accustomed to think of growing old as accumulating an increasing number of years that separate us from birth. As we grow older then we obviously are evidencing wear and tear. Lose some hair and/or it changes color. Develop some lines in our skin, that skin that used to be so lovely in color and texture. Voice gets higher and weaker. And we shrink! But, before we shrink, if we are male we get skinny legged and big bellied. Thennnn we shrink. When my son died of bone cancer at five I went back to work. But I had no interest in anything. So, by and by I went to Europe and did software for airlines. Anyone would have thought it was exciting. 25 great world airlines. I seldom made it back to the US. (BTW: all the great airlines are outside the US.) I lived in 8 countries. I played in 80. After 15 years I visited my mom. I did not recognize her. She had shrunk. I could lift her with one hand. She looked at me as if to say, “about the shrinkage? WTF! Whatcha gonna do?” You get creaky and weak kneed, grow balance problems and your body tends to fall out from under you. We begin to “catch” more and more diseases. The probability increases that one or more of those diseases threaten our existence. Whatever skills we have developed in life we are not as skilful at them as we once were. Not every doctor will agree with me, especially if they want to remain in the AMA, but every serious researcher of
aging will. Aging occurs because we are steadily losing the ability to create NO. Nitric Oxide! Exceptions begin to stand out. I talk every day with my neighbor, Bella, who is 93. She drives her car. She manages her affairs. She has her own apartment. She walks directly, erectly, circumspectly, with perfect posture.Then I have, or had, my friend, Jean, who was 98 when she died. Her brain was running perfectly. She was typing greater than 80 words per minute whatever book she was working at or whatever thing she was arguing about with the talking heads online. I sometimes think she died because she was bored. I can imagine being bored a little bit but I had begun to think her exit would never happen. I remember my friend, Alan, who used to talk about how neuropathy was treating him. Still in my 60s I could not imagine the kind of interrupting nuisance I could be advancing toward. Now I have it and the only reason I do not think about it so much is that I have a dozen other maladies that are beginning to show force demanding my attention. I was musing on this plethora of nagging illnesses that I never knew about and never noticed when I was in my forties thinking I was old. Friends, I had no idea. But I have been lately thinking, OK, many more nags abound that were not even born yet when I was in my forties. So is old age an accumulation of separate nagging conditions that I did not used to have? If so has some controlling force promoted itself to general and is marshaling all these other nags, threatening to advance against me until I am not.
NOT IF I CAN HELP IT. I MEAN UNHELP IT.
E X C E P T : : : … I kept looking for him. The General Marauder who would bring down this private Captain jack and his army of everyone else with him. As I endured the catheter procedure that used to require the bustage of the sternum, the breastbone, just to reach the heart and thennnn find a way into it once they had reached it. But me, NOW! As the catheter slid up the artery in my arm and then found the coronary arteries deep inside the heart muscle and communicated to the surgery team the arrival of cave and tunnel support in the way of an electronmicroscopic truckload of splents to open the tiring coronary arteries I began to understand what old age was errrr is I was certain I was close. I determined a plan. When they pulled that catheter back out I gathered all the paperwork that had been generated about what was happening to me. I read through it all looking for clues; looking for that one force that caused all aging. Nothing. One word somewhere. Cancer? No! Blood? No! Corporate shell games? No! Medical Error? No! NO? YES! Yes, no that is not a typo! It is the abbreviation for Nitric Oxide. NO! It only lives one half to 1 or maybe 2 seconds at most. And it is required in every part of your being. So, cool! You are thinking, cool, just get a bottle of it and a “farming suitable” prescription if you must and voila, live forever. Naw, it does not work that way. You cannot just buy it. Yes, you can get all kinds of products that say they will fill your every part with NO but that is not so. Especially, if you are old. You can fill your parts with protein, L-arginine, and it will by and by make NO in you. But, NO is specialized for the many parts of you that need NO and each of those makes its own variant. And that, only when you are young, like less than 40. After 40 the ability of your body to produce NO diminishes until it hits zero. When it hits zero is somewhat uncertain. It depends on what you eat and how you exercise. Without sufficient NO you will deteriorate until nothing is left of you but a shell. An OLD shell. Lack of knowledge on how to get NO impedes your ability to get NO and continue to be completely, vibrantly alive. You can buy NO test strips, spit on them, and compare the color on the strip with the range of pictures on the test strip bottle. That process tells ME that I am not producing NO anymore. Annnnnd my diet is nearly perfect and I probably exercise more than any old man in this town. So, what to do? Slowly fry and die? Maybe! My search for a solution is ongoing! I think I will find a solution. In time? We will see. But, I am not going to sit and rot. I was not invited to this party. And, while I can still think, I can leave the party whenever I please. I have no problem with that. I would leave anyway if I cannot dance and think about dancing. And if I did not have NTHE hanging over me. NTHE – Near Term Human Extinction! I’ll let you know how it goes! One thing I know. I have found General Marauder! Aging, it turns out, as you will have gathered by now, is not the presence of some poison or disease. General Marauder is the problem. General Marauder is a ghost. General Marauder is present by his absence. So let’s change the General Marauder’s name to Doctor NO because it is his absence that is the problem and his presence the general solution to most of the maladies of everyone, young and old. But the solution has a price tag whether you are young or old. Without Special Agent NO you are going to die. IT IS THAT SIMPLE. If you are young, under 40, it may take a while if you do not pay the price. And if you do not pay the price you will suffer a diminishing life performance. That is, you will continually grow old. You may not know you are growing old. You may not know how fast exactly. But your body knows everything because it experiences everything and it remembers everything and eventually it will tell you some things about what your failure to pay the price has cost and will cost. It is cheaper to pay your bill regularly. Your bill is cheaper if you have a discount card. The discount card comes in the form of an emotion or character trait that you have to develop. It is called an attitude card. That is correct. The attitude you have to develop is the will to add to your travel through life a desire for quality of life. Beyond a desire for quality is the will or joy of adding to your quality of life by maintenance of your life. Here are the three areas you must maintain: Diet, Exercise, Quality. Sounds simple hunh? IT IS NOT SIMPLE. As you maintain, you must consider the quality of your maintenance. That quality involves learning. Diet? What to eat and drink. How and when to eat and drink. Exercise? You must exceed the minimum you can do and how you do it. Quality/Purity/Purpose? You need a constant burning desire for purity? Want some more carbs? Want some more popcorn, ice cream, bier, wine? Can you say, “phuque no”? No? Then you must learn to say “more oxidative stress, please”. Oxidative stress, to simplify, occurs when your diet and exercise are not well maintained. If your attitude is not tuned then you will not think quality with your diet and exercise. If that becomes your way of life then your body deteriorates because your body’s ability to produce NO deteriorates. Your attitude further deteriorates until no NO can be generated in your poor quality body. Science opines that the inability to produce NO brings on a bunch of conditions any one of which will ultimately kill you. Some of these conditions are: diabetes, atherosclerosis or the hardening of the blood vessels, inflammatory conditions: high blood pressure, which is also known as hypertension heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, cancer. Yeah, I know what you are thinking. “Hey, I am going to die anyway. Yeah, but who wants to live to be one hundred years old if most of those one hundred years are terribly painful, debilitating and frankly, scary? Picture yourself shrunken, demented, bent over in a wheel chair in an “elder” care facility, unable anymore to even play bingo once a week.
Hang in there! I will have a one size fits all Nitric Oxide answer for you in no time.
STAY TUNED!
BUT, YOU MAY BE ASKING WHY i AM NOT LOOKING TO DNA MODIFICATION AS AN AVENUE. WELL THAT IS WRAPPED UP IN A LITTLE THING CALLED GROWING YOUR AREA OF RESEARCH. MY FEAR IS THAT GREED IS TURNING THE HUMAN DNA INTO A NEW INVESTMENT POOL. AND I DO NOT WANT TO MUDDY THOSE WATERS UNTIL I CLEAN UP THE ONE I AM WORKING IN.
