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NAD: New Powerhouse in Cellular Repair and Anti-aging

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Why do we age? Your body is made up of about 10 trillion cells that form our tissue, organs, blood, etc. Each cell has an essential part called mitochondria which makes energy for the cell to use and a nucleus containing DNA to indicate how the cell should function. As our cells die or replicate, we lose a little bit of our telomeres (DNA length) each time. Telomere length represents our biological age as opposed to our chronological age. The more our DNA repairs by replication, the shorter the lifespan of the cell. As we age, oxidative stress from toxin exposures from the environment, smoking, what we eat and drink, and life stressors in general, can damage our DNA even faster, causing us to age faster, not counting our genetic health predispositions. Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) is one of the most important molecules involved in aging. It is used in every cell of your body and has been shown to decrease with age. NAD has multiple functions, but the top three anti
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The CDC Says This Season’s Flu Vaccine Won’t Work. Now What?

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention recently announced that this year’s flu vaccine is not effective against the current flu strain. While this may be cause for alarm for some as we approach the peak of flu season, I am confident using other flu prevention tools will be more effective than the flu vaccine. The influenza vaccine is recommended annually for everyone older than six months of age, but just how effective is it? The flu vaccine is comprised of the three or four strains of flu most likely to be seen in a given season. The flu vaccine tends to not work very well if the strains of flu in the vaccine do not match the strains of flu in the current environment. However, on the rare occasion that the matching strain are   perfect, 1% of flu-vaccinated individuals still end up with an infection, compared to 4% of unvaccinated individuals. In the case of a partial strain match, 1% of individuals still end up with an infection versus 2% of unvaccinated individuals,
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Let the Sun Shine! Why we need Vitamin D

Living in one of the sunniest places in the world doesn’t protect us from Vitamin D deficiency. As summer comes to the desert we tend to migrate indoors spending as much time as we can away from the scorching sun, meanwhile depriving our bodies of the most important hormone in our body: Vitamin D. Believe it or not, you can get vitamin D from sunshine. The skin produces vitamin D when hit by ultraviolet light from the sun. Vitamin D deficiency is increasing nationwide at a staggering rate. Experts estimate that more than half of adults and 30 percent of children and teens in the United States are vitamin D deficient, according to the report in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. So why do I need Vitamin D? According to the Vitamin D Council Current research has implicated vitamin D deficiency as a major factor in “the pathology of at least 17 varieties of cancer as well as heart disease, stroke, hypertension, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, depression, chroni
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