Keeping your body flexible is taking a new turn – This is the third in a Special Series of articles about solving some of the greatest yet least detected threats to our health.
The flexibility of your skin, heart, arteries, and tendons is governed by one thing that until recently couldn’t be repaired as you age. That’s changing.
Cosmetics companies have sold people on the idea that restoring the collagen in your skin will keep it flexible. The only problem is that collagen keeps your skin firm and strong, but not flexible. Another fiber woven between collagen fibers plays that role. Most people have never heard of it.
The fiber is called Elastin. I call it the Elastic of Life, for the simple reason that our bodies depend on it to move, breathe, speak, pump blood, pee, give birth, and have sex. Most organs including our heart, lungs, skin, and sex organs, as well as our blood vessels, contain small but essential amounts of the stuff.
Elastin does something remarkable. It expands up to eight times its standing length, then contracts in a fraction of a second. It does this billions of times in your lifetime. It’s also the toughest flexible fiber in your body – designed to last as long as you do. To do that, it’s constructed with one of the most complex assembly processes that biologists can imagine. In fact, scientists still aren’t certain exactly how some of this happens.
It’s a bit like manufacturing the steel cables used in suspension bridges, where tiny strands are extruded from ingots, then woven together. The cable is then wrapped in a protective sheathing to prevent corrosion and other damage. Bridges move a lot in wind, earthquakes etc., and the cables let them do this by flexing.
That’s similar to what happens with elastin fiber in the body. Cells produce the raw materials, then deliver those into the space just outside their membrane wall, where they combine with other chemicals from other cells to create the finished product. That product is then woven between collagen fibers, so your body has strength from collagen and flexibility from elastin. You can see why this is such a basic part of what we are and what we do.
Given that importance, it’s strange that the role of elastin fiber isn’t taught in many biology classes and gets almost no media attention, even though thousands of scientific studies have been published about it. One reason might be that until recently, no one had proven than elastin fiber could be repaired.
When you hit the age of 25 – 30, your body still produces the building blocks of elastin fiber, but for reasons that confound even the world’s leading elastin experts, the body stops assembling it into these cables. The results are the same as what happens to a suspension bridge if it isn’t maintained. The cable sheathing gets damaged, and the cables start to fray and snap over the years. This affects the performance of the whole bridge and can eventually lead to collapse.
That’s what’s happening in all of us (without exception), and it’s a major contributor to aging. Daily living, including exposure to environmental toxins like toxic metals, but also poor nutrition and smoking, pick away at elastin fiber, so it starts to fray. When it does, it puts out a call for repair crews to come and clean up the damage. That help comes in the form of inflammatory substances that do what they’re designed to do – clear away the debris so new material can be put in place. The problem is, after you reach 30 the new material shows up, but the assembly crews that normally weave it into fibers are on strike.
So the damage continues, and the inflammation becomes chronic. This is also one reason why more inflammation shows up in our bodies as we age. This chronic inflammation also triggers processes that lead to hardening of the skin, arteries, and other organs. Those processes are commonly known as fibrosis and calcification.
How can this nasty driver of aging, wrinkles, and heart disease be stopped? It couldn’t, until recently. Around 2007, teams of scientists – one in Australia and one in South Carolina, discovered different ways to kick-start the elastin fiber assembly process. Prof. Tony Weiss at University of Sydney developed a type of elastin scaffold that is used to repair wounds for example.
Around the same time, Prof. Naren Vyavahare at Clemson University in South Carolina discovered that a substance known as Pentagalloyl Glucose derived from the rind of the pomegranate fruit and the bark of some trees, actually catalyzes the elastin self-assembly process. Then Prof. Charles Rice, also at Clemson developed an antibody that could deliver the catalyst directly to the damaged elastin in the body.
Today, their technologies have been licensed to several companies that are developing therapies for elastin repair. One of those is being tested in humans to prevent deadly aneurysms from bursting. Another has been tested for repairing skin wounds. Still another is on the market today as a non-prescription cosmetics product known as Neolastin. The exciting thing is that it’s more than just one approach, so the chances of success are much greater.
Elastin regeneration could be an important part of prolonging healthy longevity. If you’d like to learn more about the story of elastin and those who discovered how to repair it, I’ve devoted a few chapters of my latest book to it.
- About the author: Douglas Mulhall’s latest book Discovering the Nature of Longevity: Restoring the heart and body by targeting hidden stress, explores prevention and therapies for heavy metals contamination. It is recommended by the American Institute of Stress and carries a Foreword by the Chief author of the American Heart Association statement on toxic heavy metals. He co-develops award-winning certifications and standards for products globally and is a registered ISO expert on a global standard for declaring the contents of products.
- Read more from VIP Executive Contributor Douglas Mulhall: