Aging | Anti Aging | Anti Aging Treatments

As we age, we become advocates of anything claiming to be "anti aging". We want our skin to be free of wrinkles, we want our hair to remain on our heads and not turn gray, and we want our hearing and our sight and our weight to remain as they were during some other time in our lives. That's primarily why anti aging is the buzzword among today's aging population.

But no matter how much we want our bodies to stop aging, and regardless of the different anti aging products that are available, we simply can't reverse the aging process totally, not yet anyway. It's what our bodies were born to do, and they do it well.

There are plenty of anti aging products, anti aging supplements and anti aging vitamins available that slow and even disguise the signs of aging. But nothing has yet been created to change our genetic makeup, which is one factor that plays a role in how we age. And it may come as a surprise to some, but one of the most effective ways to control the aging process depends a lot on the way we care for our bodies.

There isn't a carved in stone timeline of symptoms that the body's aging process adheres to so it's hard to pinpoint the exact age each body part will wear out. So remember, living a healthy lifestyle is one of your best anti aging defenses.

The most noticeable sign of the aging process appears on our skin. Our skin is our protective outer layer and the thing that confronts the environment head on. As it ages, it begins to lose its elasticity, and wrinkles develop. Oil glands produce less oil so the skin feels dry. Anti aging skincare products like creams and sunscreens help slow down this process, and repair and moisturize damaged skin, but unfortunately, its years of exposure to damaging sun, dirt and stress have already caused damage that for the most part, is irreparable.

Another noticeable change attributed to aging is our hair. It loses its sheen and it begins to fall out. Those hairs that do remain begin losing their pigment cells which causes hair to turn gray. Anti aging hair care products can change the color, and even re-grow hair that has fallen out, but these processes cannot be halted.

As people enter their 40s and 50s, the eyes don't see as clearly as they once did. If it's not already happened, eyes start needing corrective measures. Hearing also is affected by age, although this tends to happen later on in life. Aside from lasik surgery, there are no anti aging products capable of reversing the degradation to the eyes or ears.

Many changes attributable to the aging process occur internally, and cannot be "seen". Metabolism slows down, the kidneys don't keep the body properly hydrated, bones become brittle, sexual desires begin to decline and other organs no longer work as efficiently as they once did.

The unfortunate reality is: Aging is inevitable. The aging process may be slowed down, stopped for a time, even reversed, so that signs of aging diminish for awhile but ... stopping and reversing the aging process forever just isn't going to happen even for the most die-hard anti aging advocates, not in our near future anyway.

Why do we age is the subject of tenacious, ongoing debate, interesting to some, boring to most. Most people, I would tend to imagine, simply prefer to leave it at ... "we get old, we die" and let it go at that. Yet, those same individuals don't want to get old, don't enjoy the complications of aging and most certainly don't want to die. But, to get back on track with this sections title: "Why Do We Age ...

One view or theory is that aging happens because of random wear and tear. A newer view holds that aging is more orderly and genetically driven. Proponents of this view point out that animals of similar species and exposure to wear and tear have markedly different life spans. For example ...

The Canada goose has a longevity of 23.5 years; the emperor goose only 6.3 years. It may be that animals are like plants with lives that are internally governed. Certain species of bamboo, for instance, form a dense stand that grows and flourishes for a hundred years, then, flowers all at once and dies.

The idea that living things shut down instead of wearing down or out has received substantial support in the past decade. Researchers working with the now famous worm C. elegans (two of the last five Nobel Prizes in medicine went to scientists working with the nematode) were able to produce worms that live more than twice as long and age more slowly by altering a single gene. Scientists have since come up with single-gene alterations that increase the life spans of Drosophila fruit flies, mice, and yeast. However ...

Even with these findings, scientists do not believe that our life spans are actually programmed into us. After all, for most of our hundred-thousand-year existence, except the past couple of hundred years, the average life span of human beings has been around thirty years. For example: Research suggests that subjects of the Roman Empire had an average life expectancy of twenty-eight years and yet ...

Today the average life span, in developed countries, is almost eighty years. Amazing. If human life spans depend on our genetics, then medicine has got the upper hand and we are living well beyond our appointed time. Furthermore ...

Inheritance has surprisingly little influence on longevity. James Vaupel, of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, in Rostock, Germany, notes that only six per cent of how long you'll live, compared with the average, is explained by your parents' longevity; by contrast, up to ninety per cent of how tall you are, compared with the average, is explained by your parents' height. Even genetically identical twins vary widely in life span; the typical gap being more than fifteen years.

If our genes explain less than we imagined, the wear-and-tear model may explain more than we knew. Leonid Gavrilov, a researcher at the University of Chicago, argues that human beings fail the way all complex systems fail: randomly and gradually.

As engineers have long recognized, many simple devices do not age. They continue to function reliably until a critical component fails and the whole thing dies instantly. A windup toy works smoothly, until a gear rusts or a spring breaks, and then it doesn't work at all. But complex systems, power plants for instance, have to survive and function despite having thousands of critical components. So ...

Engineers design these machines with multiple layers of redundancy; with backup systems, and backup systems for the backup systems. The backups may not be as efficient as the first-line components, but they allow the machine to keep going even as damage accumulates.

Gavrilov argues that, within the parameters established by our genes, that's exactly how human beings appear to work. We have an extra kidney, an extra lung, an extra gonad, extra teeth. The DNA in our cells is frequently damaged under routine conditions, but our cells have a number of DNA repair systems. If a key gene is permanently damaged, there are usually extra copies of the gene nearby. And, if the entire cell dies, other cells can fill in. But even so ...

As the defects in a complex system increase, the time comes when one more defect is enough to impair the whole, thus resulting in the condition known as frailty. It happens to power plants, cars, and large organizations. And ...

It also happens to us. Eventually, one too many joints are damaged, one too many arteries calcify. There are no more backups. We wear down until we can't wear down anymore.

Still, there is the question "Why do we age and does ANYONE really KNOW? To be blunt ...

Scientists have ONLY theories. Some seem more plausable than others but at this point, from what I can find reading various reasearch, nobody seems to know for certain fact .. WHY we age. And there you have it. We age, we wear out, we shut down. It's inevitable. But there is some hope for achieving some more really great years.

To learn EXACTLY HOW you can slow down, stop, even reverse aging click here