The #1 Most Important Protein to Slow Down Aging and Increase Longevity

Few scientific advances in recent years have been as game-changing as the discovery of mTOR (the mammalian target of rapamycin).

Called “The CEO of Aging” by some of the top longevity experts in the world, it plays a role in cell proliferation, immune cell differentiation, tumor metabolism, and cell longevity.

In this blog post, you’ll learn everything there is to know about mTOR, how it affects you, what you can do to control it, and how being more conscious of its activity can help you extend your lifespan significantly!

Understanding “Aging”

Since the beginning of time, mankind has been trying to find ways to fight aging and prolong life. We struggle and “rage against the dying light” knowing that our time on earth is finite but desperately wanting to extend it as much as possible.

But here’s the truth: everything ages.

Think about it: the glasses in your dishwasher get nicks and scratches and will ultimately break, or perhaps will get knocked off the kitchen counter, and ultimately will cease to be a glass.

This isn’t called “aging”, but it’s the same concept.

Over time, your body will also get its own share of “nicks and scratches”—in the form of injuries, deficiencies, and dysfunctions—that will ultimately lead to its deterioration.

We humans and other multicellular living organisms appear to age very little until we reach adulthood. In adulthood, we visually notice the accumulation of damage, starting out more linearly in younger years and increasing exponentially as we get older. It is that exponential increase that we perceive as "aging".

There is something important you need to know about, though, and that’s the concept of biological vs. chronological aging.

No matter what we do, we can’t stop the march of time. We can’t stop ourselves from growing one day older, one week older, and one year older. This is our chronological age and it is beyond our control.

Our biological age, however, is a different matter altogether.

Biological age is marked not by the passage of time, but by the damage that accumulates in the body. The more injuries we suffer, the slower our organs function, the more our skin sags and our hair grays, the more our cardiovascular system struggles, the slower our cognition—all of these are signs of our biological age.

The good news, though, is that chronological age and biological age aren’t inextricably linked.

It’s possible for someone who is 50 years old to have the biological age of a 30 year old because their internal systems and organs are functioning at optimum capacity.

Of course, the reverse is true, too. It’s possible for a 30 year old to have the biological age of a 60 year old because all of their internal works are slowed, deteriorating, gummed up, and just not working properly.

When we talk about mTOR and its effects on aging, what we’re talking about is how it can help to address biological aging. It won’t slow the passage of time, but everything you’ll read below will show you how you can optimize cellular function so your body functions like a much “younger” organism.

And that’s the real key to “prolonging life”: from the inside out!

The How and Why of Biological Aging

The most important thing to understand about biological aging is that most diseases and dysfunctions are the result of miscommunication—between the many, many cells that make up our body.

We are a collection of 15 to 20 trillion cells and 9 to 10 times that many bacteria, all of which ultimately have to work harmoniously and collectively as one.

That requires A LOT of incredibly intricate communication. Sadly, those venues of communication become corrupted, especially as we age biologically.

For example:

• The brain doesn't know how much fat a person has as it becomes resistant to leptin, and cells can't properly listen to insulin.

• The liver doesn't know how much glucose is circulating and therefore how much it should be making.

• The body no longer knows when to store fat and when to burn it. It doesn't know how to turn off inflammation or what is foreign and what is part of oneself, which leads to autoimmune disease.

• Calcium builds up in arteries rather than our bone.

• The ability to trigger our internal repair mechanisms becomes corrupted and cells get more of a signal to replicate, increasing our risk of cancer and decreasing our lifespan.

To sum it up, one cell doesn't know what another cell is doing. The brain doesn't know what the body is doing and vice versa.

The cohesion of our bodies begins to disintegrate, and that, ultimately, is what causes biological aging.

To understand cell cohesion, you have to understand how the cells in our bodies work, and what compels them to do what they do.

Cells have an energy budget.

In our evolutionary history, energy and food weren’t necessarily available 24/7. There were times of feast and famine, and especially during times of more famine, life had to decide what to do with its energy.

Cells are basically programmed to do two things:

1. Replicate/reproduce

2. Repair/maintain

Typically, if cells perceive a continuous supply of nutrients there will be a "drive" to replicate. This is usually a good thing—it’s critical for growth and optimal function—but sometimes it can have negative consequences. Simply put, if our cells start over replicating, this can lead to age-related chronic diseases like obesity and cancer.

On the other hand, if there isn’t enough energy available to make a new baby, our bodies go into energy-conservation mode. It will divert energy away from replication and put it more towards cell repair and maintenance—which it does in order to survive longer and stay healthier for when an appropriate time for reproduction comes later.

This “repair mode” is really the state that will translate into longevity, as this maintenance environment is less inductive to disease.

Ultimately, this process is controlled by mTOR, which receives signals from nutrient sensors and tells our cells whether to repair or gives them a green light to replicate.

The Nutrient Sensors That Determine Longevity

There are a few major sensors that will detect the availability of nutrients and redirect our genes—essentially effecting our genetic expression.

These include (most notably):

Leptin – Leptin is a hormone that is produced by your body’s fat cells, also commonly referred to as the “hunger hormone” or “satiety hormone”.

It mostly targets the brain and signals that you’ve stored enough fat so you should eat less. It also plays a role in energy regulation, controlling your calorie expenditure as well as fat storage. Much less known, but equally important, it plays a critical role in immunity and inflammation.

Insulin – Insulin is a hormone produced in your pancreas, responsible for storing excess nutrients, especially glucose. Insulin recognizes when your blood glucose levels become too high and its job is to store the excess. It is through that process of storing the excess, that blood sugar comes down.

The problem is that over time, and as the result of bad diet and inactive lifestyle, our bodies don’t respond to insulin as effectively—a problem called insulin resistance, that leads to blood sugar rises that can culminate in prediabetes and eventually Type 2 Diabetes.

Even worse, it causes insulin to remain elevated more permanently that accelerates biological aging and its chronic symptoms of disease.

Understanding the role these two nutrients play in our cellular signaling can help to clarify their role in aging. Simply put: if we keep those nutrient sensors low, it translates more to repair and regeneration that would slow down the aging process.

Autophagy and Its Role in Longevity

Autophagy is a cellular mechanism whereby damaged molecules—especially proteins, and damaged organelles like mitochondria—are detected and broken down, and their useful parts recycled.

This process can be triggered during times of perceived nutrient shortages, such as fasting or calorie restriction. This recycling of broken-down molecules is what enables our bodies to regenerate and repair damage.

However, it takes certain hormones to signal to the body that there’s a nutrient shortage and therefore it should dial up recycling.

Want to guess which those hormones are? That’s right: insulin and leptin!

These hormones trigger autophagy to clear the glycated “junk” from your body and improve cellular repair.

However, as we age and because of bad diet and lifestyle choices, autophagy diminishes, and that leads to the accumulation of cellular junk, which in turn causes cellular damage, especially in cells with a low turnover rate.

Nerves are particularly prone, including the nerves that make up our brain mass, as there is little cellular turnover to remove “junk” particles and cells.

Over time, the buildup of cellular junk caused by the decrease of autophagy leads to aging.

But there’s good news: autophagy is controlled by mTOR. By managing your mTOR levels, you can increase your body’s ability to scavenge and eliminate all that “junk” that is accelerating your biological aging process!

A Closer Look at mTOR

mTOR, or the mechanistic target of rapamycin, was discovered in 1991 as a new protein enzyme, a metabolic pathway, that a natural substance named “rapamycin” targeted and effected (hence the name, “target of rapamycin”).

Rapamycin itself was found decades earlier from soil samples taken from the Easter islands by a group of scientists sent by a pharmaceutical company to search for new and potentially therapeutic chemicals. Rapamycin was found to have anti-fungal properties.

Decades later, however, and virtually by accident, scientists discovered that the mTOR enzyme, one far more ancient than hormones, is instrumental in aging and lifespan.

It is, to put it simply, a metabolic switchboard, a protein enzyme that is found in almost all cells of life.

mTOR receives input from insulin, leptin, other growth factors, and even raw nutrients (such as amino acids and glucose from food) and senses the amount of energy, oxygen, and nutrient levels in our bodies. Based on all of these signals, it decides what to do with cellular metabolism—whether a cell should replicate or hunker down and increase repair and regeneration.

If mTOR is receiving signals that there is plenty of energy, it shifts into replication/reproduction mode. As we saw above, too much cellular replication can get out of control, leading to cancer and other diseases of biological aging, including:

Fatty liver and insulin resistance. Elevated mTOR and leptin resistance causes fat to accumulate in the wrong places, like in your liver, literally and figuratively choking off insulin signaling that would normally tell the liver to stop making glucose.

• Inhibited function of insulin receptors. Cells then can’t “hear” insulin signals effectively and have a diminished ability to transport glucose into cells.

• Negatively affecting the pancreatic cells responsible for producing insulin and controlling blood sugar levels, which are called islet cells. It pushes these important cells towards senescence and death, ultimately resulting in “double diabetes”, that is both insulin-resistant and insulin-deficient.

• Pushing endothelial cells to become damaging senescent inflammatory cells that speed up the “aging” of our cardiovascular system.

• Accumulating junk proteins in nerves, especially in the brain.

However, if mTOR is getting messages that there are not a lot of nutrients available (especially glucose or animal protein), it signals cells to go into maintenance and repair mode.

Ultimately, increasing maintenance and repair far more suits our purpose of improving health and longevity.

Autophagy is also triggered by keeping insulin, leptin and mTOR low, which gives instructions to the cells to repair the damage rather than replicate.

The key is to keep mTOR low by sending the right nutrient signals.

How to Keep mTOR Low

As you know, our eating habits, lifestyle and environmental factors influence the internal processes and hormones within our body, leading to the negative effects of aging.

It should come as no surprise that the way you eat will have a direct impact on mTOR levels.

Here are some tips and hacks you can implement today in order to “tame” mTOR and slow down the aging process:

• Lower meat consumption. High amounts of protein, and especially animal protein and the amino acid Leucine, is the reason why your mTor level skyrockets. Reducing animal protein intake will help keeping your mTOR levels low.

• Eat more healthy fats. Coconut oil, ghee, avocadoes, olive oil, and other plant-based fats will provide the energy your body needs to function but won’t raise mTOR.

• Limit your intake of sugar-forming carbohydrates and starches. Sugar forming carbohydrates such as bread, rice, pasta, potatoes, cereals, sweet desserts, sugary drinks, highly processed and most fast and deep-fried foods all raise insulin levels, which signal to mTOR that you have excess energy and thus can enter “replication mode”.

• Minimize stress. Stress has been proven to impact mTOR negatively, as this molecule senses and responds to a wide range of stressors. Stress also raises blood glucose, which in turn triggers insulin release.

• Take care of your gut microbiota. Environmental changes in the gut and gut bacteria composition can affect the mTOR signaling pathway, leading to more rapid aging and a higher risk of chronic disease and immune system malfunctioning.

However, there are also some particularly potent herbal ingredients that have been proven to lower mTOR.

These include:

Berberine – This can slow cellular aging by up to 72%, reduce blood sugar levels, regulate blood pressure, improve heart health, lower triglycerides, encourage fat loss, and even regulate mood.

Trans-Resveratrol – This polyphenol helps your body to “turn off genes that promote aging”, and it’s a powerful mTOR inhibitor and a longevity agent, which in some studies improved the lifespan of mice by around a mind-blowing 31%.

Fisetin – Fisetin blocks overactive mTor, which makes it a powerful natural ingredient to support healthy longevity, youthfulness and health. It can also reduce skin wrinkles, increase collagen production, protect the skin from inflammatory and DNA damage, support brain health, improve circulation, and even protect your bones.

Matcha Green Tea – EGCG, a powerful polyphenol found in green tea, is able to significantly suppress elevated mTOR levels and protect cells from damage. EGCG has also been found to promote longevity in the body and help protect the skin against sun damage.

Turmeric – Curcuma, the active component of turmeric, is actually a super strong mTor inhibitor, antioxidant, and anti-inflammatory ingredient that can stimulate your antioxidant defense and stop dangerous free radicals from rapidly aging your body.

Vitamin D3 – This vitamin supports strong immunity, promotes youthfulness by keeping elevated mTor levels low, can reduce your biological age of your cells in just 16 weeks and prevent skin cell deterioration by as much as 70%.

Vitamin K2 – This vitamin inhibits high levels of mTOR, promotes strong bones and teeth, boosts memory function, lowers inflammation, and improves heart health.

Knowing the power all of these herbal ingredients have to keep mTOR levels low and improve your longevity, we’ve put them all together into a single supplement, the only age-boosting, longevity-improving, mTOR-focused formula of its kind on the market.

Restore Life is formulated to manage mTor levels so that you live looking and feeling younger. Plus, it also has some exceptional benefits for your skin, blood sugar, bones, heart, joints and cellular health.

Click here to learn more about Restore Life and find out how it can change your future for the better by keeping mTOR low, improving autophagy, and helping you to live your best, youngest, and healthiest life!

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