This is a highly personal blog entry, generally light in its approach but containing some relevant scientific content. It raconteurs a variety of topics, and is intended to provide context and information about me for blog readers. It is especially for those who follow what I have been saying about keeping healthy and active and who would like to track how I am actually doing. The adage “Pay more attention to what he is doing than to what he is saying” is good advice too-often applicable to politics and also to any published advice on health and longevity. I write this from the perspective of a longevity researcher who is about to turn 90 and is projecting out how he thinks things will go between now and 100 and perhaps even until he reaches 110. In the process I disclose a few matters about myself that might be new and surprising even to my longstanding readers. It describes my recent journey from being just an intellectual-teller to also being a craftsman-entrepreneur.
First of all, I continue to be healthy, active, productive and professionally involved and expect to continue doing so until at least 100.
- I can still wrestle and twist my 100-pound lawnmower over the rugged, rocky and rooted 1.5-acre terrain that is my house front and back yard. And dig up heavy rocks and chainsaw big fallen tree branches. Just did some of that.
- I am getting deeper and deeper involved in managing my new dietary supplement business, 4 Herb Synergy, believing that it offers the best single intervention I have now for contributing to my own health and longevity.
- I can still manage to pursue my 4-year-old grandson around and outside the house with hope of catching him, and pick up and hold my wiggly 3-year old granddaughter while paying attention to my wife asking me to take out the trash NOW.
- I am still to my knowledge free of any of the degenerative diseases of old age that kill people – diabetes, dementias, cancers, inflammatory disorders of various kinds. And I have the temerity to believe I can keep myself that way.
- I am still intending to pursue my longevity science career toll I am 100 or more, always out to acquire new insights, writing what is on my mind, talking at professional meetings when invited, and doing podcasts.
- I am still waking up in the middle of the night with possibly crazy ideas on biological science topics and staggering off to a computer to capture them. Sometimes my wife wakes up and catches me doing this and asks “Are you all right?” I can feel a bit sheepish when I explain what I am doing to her.
- Just about everything I said in the previous personal blog update ON LONGEVITY INTERVENTIONS – MAINLY PERSONAL published in April of this year is still valid. This present blog is also highly personal, but mainly relates to additional topics.
I seem to be taking constantly longer and broader perspectives. This applies to my own life as well as my views on society.
Here are some old-man reminiscences. I state them to convey some messages: In the past I was fairly good at identifying new trends and movements that I thought would have a big impact on society. And then, joining them. This seems to be an ongoing lifelong pattern for me right up to this moment. I am still the same me.
I have living memories of life in the Great Depression, World War II, The Cold War, Sputnik, the Civil Rights marches and many other epochs and events known to others only through history. I can watch historical films with a perspective that I was alive then and went through it before. I heard about the Pearl Harbor bombing on the radio an hour after it happened and, the next day, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous “Day in Infamy” radio speech. I saw newsreel movies of the sunken battleships in Pearl Harbor, Hitler rallies with 10,000 people giving the “Sig Heil” salute, saw Mussolini addressing adoring crowds from a balcony. I heard Kennedy’s promise to land a man on the moon and then saw it happen on a fuzzy black-and-white TV. So, I see many of today’s happenings from a personal historic viewpoint, perhaps a tad less anxiously than do many younger contemporaries. This period of time seems to be characterized by denegation of science, political and commercial greed, dismantling of social and health safety nets, corruption and rising danger of nuclear war. These too should pass.
We are in the middle of a century which is for biology like the 20th century was for physics and electronics – one of amazing discoveries and practical applications. I think we now know less than 20% of what there is of importance to know about biology. And our patterns related to life and longevity are still mainly driven by tradition, personal greed, commercial greed, and longstanding social habits. We need to recognize and deal with these factors to free ourselves to move forward. That is a long process that I am seeking to contribute to. But I cannot expect too much to happen over a year, or even over 10 years. Patience is essential. I have to be content with contributing only as I can, even if I think my vision enables me to see a wonderful potential future for our human species. It must be all about the species, not me.
I have a lifelong pattern of looking to my future more than going over my past, but now I am allowing my past to contribute more to my future outlook. As the years continue to roll by, I have more and more direct experience to help guide my future actions.
- Many dreams or projections when I was much younger were highly prophetic.
- My best friend from when I was 7 was Jerry Colet. In 1944 his family acquired one of the very first TVs sold after WW2. I think it had a 3-inch screen like the Pilot TV set shown in the picture. We lived in the same apartment building and I would often watch TV with Jerry, crowding close to the tiny screen to see anything more than a moving blur. The black-and-white pictures were smeary, jerky and so poor you could hardly make out faces. I had a very vivid dream then when I was about 14. Of a gigantic color TV with a picture so clear and vivid it was completely real. A window on the world, showing beautiful scenes of natural wonders. I knew someday that dream would reflect reality, as it does now. The HD TVs in our house now are much bigger than the one in the dream and the picture quality just as detailed and vivid. And with streaming 4K video I can choose to see on them just about everything there is to see in the world.
- In 1944 at age 14, I read an article in Popular Science about a completely new thing – a “Giant Brain,” created by Howard Aiken, the man who built the first general-purpose computer at Harvard during WW2, the Harvard Mark 1 shown in the picture. The computer was 51 feet long, 8 feet high and weighed 5 tons. All the logic depended on electromagnetic relays since the computer was built before transistor or even vacuum tube digital circuits existed. Later in 1950 I started learning about computers from another computer pioneer Arthur Burks at the University of Michigan, and in 1953 was creating and running programs on the first Burroughs computer, the UDEC at Wayne State University, working for another computer pioneer Arvid Jacobson. Howard Aiken enrolled me as a Ph.D. student in his lab at Harvard in 1953. The Harvard Mark 1 was still running in the same big room shown. I did my research for a PhD late at night running programs on a Univac 1 installed there in the empty space shown. While working there, from time to time somebody turned off all the lights plunging us and the enormous computer room and into darkness. I finally discovered that was this was to debug the Mark 1 by allowing technicians to look for tiny sparks from faulty relay units. A Google search on Vincent E. Giuliano will reveal many of the accomplishments and publications in my computer-related career following getting that PhD in 1959.
At age 72 I decided to transition to a new career in longevity science, and that is still my main career. That is because I saw similarities between this 21st century and the last 20th century. I perceived that a pattern of research, discoveries, inventions, commercial and social developments existed in the last century related to electronics. And that a similar pattern of research, discoveries, inventions, commercial and social developments exist now related to life sciences. Just as the 20th century was one of electronics, the 21st century will be one of the life sciences. So I wanted to tie my future to the life sciences. And I picked longevity as a sub-focus because it would be inconvenient for me to die soon in the process. Growing ever older, I needed to know for myself what I had to do to keep going. And going. And going further.
- Now, a little more than a month ago, I started up a new entrepreneurial career with the Synergy Bioherbals family business. My first business began when was I dropped out of high school at age 14 and opened up a storefront radio repair business on 12th street in Detroit. That was in 1944 when World War II was ending. I spent a fair amount of time then waiting for the next customer to come in the door of the shop. Now I am constantly going online to see if any new customers for 4HerbSynergy have come in to my online shop. Fortunately, this time around I have plenty of valuable things to do while waiting.
Some of my personal characteristics formed early in my youth persist to today
For example, I am frugal in funny ways., I will keep and wear torn and stained shirts and pants on days when I don’t go out, and will always strive to eat everything on my food plates. I may keep jars of creamed herring or olives in the fridge long after their expiration dates. If I see a decent-looking rubber band or paper clip on a sidewalk, I will pick it up and put it in my pocket to take home. And I am notorious for never throwing anything out that I think may ever be used again. Including chainsaws and dehumidifiers and toaster ovens that need repair. And I keep racks of ancient clothing in my attic to feed the moths. I still keep my college textbooks and class notes, and I have my first and only tuxedo from 1950. I have a “depression-era thrift mentality” this way, learned in part from my mother Pearl and her father James who lived nearby while I was a child. James would often shop for us since my mother, a single mom, worked for something like $25 a week as a secretary in the Wayne County Welfare Department. From when I was 8, James would knock on the wire-glass fire-safety door of our apartment and when my mother opened it, he would say something like “Pearl, here is the rutabagas you wanted me to buy. You owe me three cents.” My mother might say “I only have two pennies; I have to give you a nickel.” He would take it and fifteen minutes later he would knock on the door again “Pearl, here are the two pennies I owe you.” In his childhood in Piedmont Italy, James’ parents could not afford to raise him. So they apprenticed him when he was 8 to a tinkerer, a man who had a little push-cart and went up and down the cobbled streets shouting his presence and sharpening knives and repairing pans with solder. James saved what little money he could, and about by age 18 had enough to buy a steerage-class steamship ticket to the USA. So James came over on a boat from Italy about 1905 without money or education and was recruited at the dock to go to work in the Calumet copper mines. Later he worked at other mines and at the original Highland park factory of Ford motors In the 1930s during the Great Depression, he saved his pennies and nickels and invested in the stock market. He died a millionaire in the 1940s. He was a very gruff man. He did not like me and was sometimes cruel to me, but I learned very important lessons from him.
Kids often bullied me as a child in grade school. They questioned my patriotism I had an Italian name and, after all, Italians were our enemies during WW2. And at the time there was still much prejudice against Italian immigrants just like there is today against Hispanic immigrants. I did not matter to kids that my father was born in Detroit and my mother was born in Salt Lake City. Suffice it to say, I had a lot of emotional wound-healing and growing to do to get to where I am today.
Emergence of key Motivators
Through my life but especially in recent years, my actions are governed by a small set of key motivators.
These include Mission and Purpose, Identity Commitment, Health, Goals, Priorities and Plans, Learning, Compassion, Urgency, and Congruity. I will devote only a few words to each here though a book could be written on them.
Mission and Purpose: My Mission and Purpose in life is to be of service to other living entities and life itself.
Identity Commitment: I identify myself basically as a member of the human species and my strongest commitment is to the survival, continuity, wellbeing, and long life of that species. I am committed secondarily but still strongly to other usual entities including family, nation, and to my continuing being alive. My commitment extends to factors necessary for the wellbeing of our species, including the health of the planet itself, the wellbeing of countless supporting species, peaceful and sustainable economic development and humane social conditions.
Health: Health is a personal necessity for me to be successful in any of my endeavors, and my commitment to health extends outwards from me to family members closest to me, to my communities, to our species, to members of other species, and to the planet in general.
Goals and Plans; I depend on these for behavior beyond that which is endowed in me via genetics, epigenetics and social force fields. I consciously set my own goals, priorities and plans. Or at least, I think I do. And I seek to behave in ways that reflects these priorities. I have been doing this since I was a teenager. Am I always successful in behaving in such a deliberate manner? No, but I am slowly getting better at it due to the urgency that comes with old age.
Learning: I don’t know most of what there is to know. But ignorance for me is rarely a good reason for inaction. I believe I must be constantly learning to keep functioning. I have long thought that anything worth doing is still worth doing even if this means doing it badly at first. All great achievements are based on improvements after first attempts. The important thing is to keep trying things and to learn from feedback from earlier actions. Wheels on cars require ball bearings for them to function reliably, but ball bearings in wheels came only thousands of years after the first wheels were used.
Compassion: My fellow human beings are doing as well as they can give their backgrounds, capabilities and priorities. I need to be compassionate to them even if they are very different from me or if I strongly disagree with them about important things.
Urgency: As I grow ever-older and the needs of our species loom bigger and my probable remaining lifespan becomes shorter, urgency of each of these motivators increases.
Congruity; Given the urgency my actions need to be congruent with these motivators and respond to them with integrity. Such could likely not be the case, for example, if I had a strong drug addiction or if I spent most of my time playing video games.
My latest thinking on longevity interventions
Currently, I am very excited about certain streams of both theoretical and practical actionable developments; the first is controlling chronic inflammation for allowing us to live up to and possibly beyond 100 years of age with vitality, good health, and full functionality. The second is on regenerative medicine, on regenerating problematic or diseased cells, organs and bodily systems like salamanders can grow new limbs or tails. These are visions medicine recently told us were impossible. I also continue to be very interested in circadian regulation. This poorly-understood area is of great importance because the efficacy or lack of efficacy of just about any health intervention we can think of depends crucially on when that intervention takes place. I say a few words on each of these streams of theory and practice here, and provide a few links to where the topics are explored more thoroughly.
- Controlling chronic inflammation
Regular readers of this blog know I have focused on chronic inflammation and its control over the last 3-4 years, writing a number of blog entries on or related to this topic. I understand chronic inflammation as a key concomitant to all the degenerative diseases if old age (cardiovascular problems, cancers, diabetes, dementias, sclerotic diseases, etc.) and as a Great Killer of older people – if not actually Their Greatest Killer. The exciting message is that we now know some practical ways to control and limit chronic inflammation.
- For example, quality fish oil supplements contain a number of chemicals that can assist in resolving normal body inflammatory events, natural and necessary biological processes, and help bring such inflammatory episodes to termination so they are not chronic. I tell the story of these in the blog entry Inflammation Part 3: resolving inflammation – resolvins, protectins, maresins and lipoxins.
- My latest passion, as many of you already know Is a dietary supplement developed by me and my family which is called 4 Herb Synergy and which is already on the market. This product was explicitly designed and fine-tuned for the control of chronic inflammation. If you are interested in the history of how we got to making this, you can read my blog entry The making of a dietary supplement – the long and short histories of it. And if you are interested in the impressive amount of science that drove the design of the product, you can read the blog entry INFLAMMATION PART 6: THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE 4 HERB SYNERGY DIETARY SUPPLEMENT.
(DISCLOSURE: I INVENTED THIS PRODUCT AND WITH OTHER FAMILY MEMBERS AM AN OWNER OF THE COMPANY SELLING IT.)
- Regenerative Medicine: cell, organ and body system renewal
I can recall one summer when I was perhaps 6 I found a brightly-colored and slimy salamander under a wet rock. I grabbed it by the tail. And then I found myself just holding the wiggling tail with the rest of the salamander scampering off. I felt very sorry for the harm I had done to the little beast. But a few days later I looked again under the same rock and saw what looked like the same salamander, complete with a new tail. An uncle explained to me that salamanders can grow new tails and legs, but we can’t do that ourselves. I have wondered about the WHY of that ever since and in recent years have been excited by breakthroughs in the science of regenerative medicine. “Regenerative medicine may be defined as the process of replacing or “regenerating” human cells, tissues or organs to restore or establish normal function. This field holds the promise of regenerating damaged tissues and organs in the body by replacing damaged tissue or by stimulating the body’s own repair mechanisms to heal tissues or organs(ref).” I think it will be increasingly relevant as we seek longer and longer health spans and lifespans.
- When the first breakthroughs related to epigenetically reversing the age of body cells into IPSCs occurred about 10 years by applying the OSKM “Yamanaka Factors,” these excited me and I generated a series of posts on the topic(ref)(ref)(ref),
- And very recently I published what I think will turn out to be a very important blog post AGING, CELL AND TISSUE REPAIR, RENEWAL AND REGENERATION, INFLAMMATION AND THE SASP. This blog post states a number of facts that are solidly grounded in current research – but that are downright heretical from the viewpoint of discussions on cell senescence now going around in the anti-aging science community.
Regenerative medicine has already had a profound impact on my personal life. Let me tell you about corneal ulcers and NGF (nerve growth factor). For over a year my wife was treated for recurrent corneal ulcers – infections in the cornea of one eye which were treated by antibiotics but kept coming back. These were very painful and negatively impacted her vision and quality of life, despite that she was being treated by nationally famous practitioners -researchers in corneal health at Mass Eye and Ear Hospital. Finally, with their recommendation, my wife was insurance-approved for a very expensive treatment that would regenerate her corneal nerves, actually grow new nerves, which would enable migration onto the cornea of stem cells which would in turn prevent the infections and ulcers. The nerve-growth factor medication is called Oxervate, This drug was approved by the FDA only in 2018 Dr. Reza Dana, my wife’s senior physician at Mass Eye and Ear hospital, helped get it approved for use in the US. The first administration to a US patient was reported in 2019 and my wife’s treatment started soon thereafter. “Cenegermin is the active ingredient in Oxervate. It is the recombinant version of human nerve growth factor (NGF), discovered by biochemist and neurologist Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini of Italy. Her groundbreaking work on cenegermin earned her the Nobel Prize(ref).“ For more details, see Topical recombinant human nerve growth factor an innovation in ocular surface disease treatment.
The Oxervate arrived weekly for 8 weeks at our garage door in 70 pound boxes which were actually small insulated refrigerators. Most of the weight was dry ice, solid frozen carbon dioxide there to make sure the Oxervate stays cold. Oxervate payload in each box weighed less than an ounce, less than the weight of a pickle slice. My wife finished her Oxervate treatment over a week ago, and she and her physicians and I so far think that the regenerative treatment is working, though it’s far too early to be sure. This is a real example of high technology regenerative medicine that is available right now. So regenerative medicine is already beyond being just something on-the-come which I think will impact our future. I will do my best to stay on top of this area in this blog and fully expect to experience other personal impacts of it soon.
Circadian regulation
I have written about this topic in the past: Shedding new light on circadian rhythms in 2014, and in January 2012, my colleague-writer Victor posted a blog entry Circadian Regulation,NMN, Preventing Diabetes, and Longevity
I now see circadian regulation to be of increasing importance and I started reviewing the newer literature of it. Living organisms have mostly evolved where there are night-and-day cycles driven by earth’s rotation around its axis. Accordingly, most biological systems are tuned to respond to times in those cycles when survival has dictated they need be most and least responsive. As a result, mammals have evolved both central and peripheral clocks that respond to time of day, season and other factors such as recent food consumption.
“The central clock in mammals stems from a network of neurons in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN); these neurons, in addition to maintaining their own cell-intrinsic clock, receive photic cues from the retina to synchronize peripheral day and night cycles throughout the body using a variety of mechanisms, including nervous system signaling, body temperature regulation, hormonal signaling, and regulation of metabolism [2,3]. Peripheral tissue circadian rhythms are synchronized by the central clock, but they also contain their own cell-intrinsic circadian rhythms [4].(ref)” The central clock has as key actors two genes called CLOCK and BMAL1, which interact in transcriptional feedback loops.
My new interest in circadian regulation is stimulated by recent research in natural regenerative processes, which indicate that these too are under tight circadian regulation. I hope to report more on this in this blog soon. Each body system involved in regeneration contains a complex network of cell types with different circadian mechanisms contributing to that regeneration. I plan to lay that out for you in further detail. And a practical matter I hope to be able to report on is, for various classes of dietary supplements, what is generally the best time of day to take them?
Why start selling supplements at my age?
Invention of the wheel My motivation for doing this is complex and includes urgency. I tell you a little imagined story to give you an idea: Imagine a time way back in pre-history when we humans were just settling down from nomadic existence to primitive agriculture, around 3,500BC. There were a few tribal wise men or tellers, and some even foretold a future where things could be moved around more easily – in contraptions they described which we would now call primitive wheelbarrows and carts. The tellers would talk about these to anybody who would listen. Important to these imagined contraptions are things now known as wheels. But that telling by itself made no difference in peoples’ lives. They still hauled dead animals or pots of water on their backs or animal backs or by dragging them on the ground. This is sort of how I regard many of the writings in this blog – interesting but making little real difference in peoples’ lives. As a blog writer I have been a teller.
Then, here and there, there were a few farmers who were also amateur craftsmen, or perhaps had sons or daughters who were taken to woodworking. I am talking about the individuals who started making the earliest most primitive wheelbarrows and carts with wheels. People started using these first wheelbarrows and carts to haul soil, rocks, dead animals, vegetables, and animal feeds. Probably the first such vehicles were made by such farmer-craftsmen for their own use. Perhaps some of these people were tellers who grew frustrated that others did not listen to them. Perhaps they had suffered injuries that prevented them carrying enough to get by. Other saw these contraptions and some wanted their own vehicles. Cart craftsmanship became a specialty, and craftsmen built better and better carts. In time, wheeled vehicles enabled vastly better commerce and were demanded by people engaged in commerce. As the iron age came along, iron-mongers made metal rims for wheels, improving their ability to maintain roundness and endure road wear. The key step here was the craftsmen building actual vehicles, not just the tellers talking about them.
My journey from teller to craftsman. So, going back to my own story, four years ago I knew I could go on and on telling my blog readers about the incredible complexity of inflammatory processes, NF-kB the master inflammatory pathway, NRF2, the multiple pathways herbal substances use to inhibit inflammation, etc, etc. I would be like the village teller. Except that I knew that for all but a few highly trained specialists, my blogs were too technical to be followed. Most people could not read and understand passages like this one from a blog of about average technical complexity: “An inflammasome is a cytosolic high molecular weight protein complex that can detect and be activated by any of a number of signal sources that could initiate a possible problem for the cell, including microbial toxins, live bacteria, xeno-compounds, viruses, fungi, mycobacteria, or Protozoa exposure. These activators are also known as Pathogen-Associated Molecular Patterns (PAMPs) and Danger-Associated Molecular Patterns (DAMPs). A number of different inflammasomes have been identified including a number named because of the NLR protein they contain, including NLRP1, and the most-studied one NLRP3. Others include the IPAF (NLRC4) inflammasome. Not all inflammasomes contain a member of the NLR family, such as the recently-discovered AIM2 (absent in melanoma) inflammasome). The primary purpose of the Inflammasome is to trigger the activation of the mature form of Caspace-1, IL-1 and IL-18, potent inflammatory cytokines that are secreted by the cell after activation by the Inflammasome. Another purpose can be to accelerate cell death via pyroptosis. The Inflammasome components are mostly proteins encoded by NF-kB transcription factor regulated genes. However the JAK-STAT pathway also plays a role.” Can you really follow that or are you willing to take the time and effort to do so to understand it? This, knowing that many other paragraphs of equal or greater complexity will follow? If the answer is “no” than you probably understand why I decided to go on from being a teller to also being a craftsman builder. I also knew four years ago that I had developed a dietary supplement that was working well for me.
What I have been preaching to others in this blog is understanding, but not necessarily easily actionable understanding, not necessarily understanding that would make much of a difference. So, I decided to add the craftsman role to my existing teller role, and continued crafting a science-based dietary supplement that I thought could provide many of the benefits I was writing about. At first and for a long time this supplement was only for my own use. Then, as we improved the home-made product, family members and selected friends started using it. After we became convinced that it works and after years of improvement, we decided to get it out there as a commercial product. It is now on the market and called 4HerbSynergy. A much more complete history of 4 Herb Synergy is in a recent blog entry The making of a dietary supplement – the long and short histories of it.
The idea of packing knowledge into a product that people can use to improve their lives without understanding the knowledge itself is very well established. Do you understand how your cell phone really works? Your auto engine? Your refrigerator? Your GPS? Your medicines? —- Probably not but that is OK. You can take advantage of the knowledge by using the product without actually knowing the knowledge itself.
I tend to be both a theoretician and an experimenter, with a lifelong pattern of puttering to create useful things
My interest on making things is also nearly lifelong. When I was perhaps 7, a friend of my mother who was in the radio repair business gave me two large cardboard boxes of what for him was largely junk, radios that did not work anymore, tubes, circuit boards of the times, condensers and resistors, a working soldering iron, wires – all things that could be recycled to build all kinds of interesting devices. This pile of junk occupied a large table in my bedroom which I called “my lab,” and soon I was reading about how to make things, and then making them. The first was a RF oscillator, a tiny AM broadcasting station that was an ugly mess of dangling wires; but it actually worked. I kept adding to my lab – used telephones and surplus WW2 military electronic devices, more and more radio junk. Later as a teen I moved my lab to a much larger space in the 3rd floor of my grandmother’s immense house. There, I acquired some heavier equipment like an obsolete dental x-ray machine and a ponderous war-surplus 2-way military tank radio. I joined the Institute of Electronic Engineering when I was in the 9th grade. I was ever building Tesla Coils, and more and more sophisticated contraptions. In my later University years, I went back to that lab during weekends and vacations several times to build things. Some were radio jammers used to silence the loud radios in the college dormitory rooms next to mine that kept me up at night and made it very hard to study. One was demonstration digital circuits on a large display board that demonstrated how Boolean logical operators could be realized in hardware. They were built from surplus relays used in shoe x-ray machines. This was in a graduate seminar taught by Arthur Burks, a computer pioneer and that in 1950 marked my entrance to the world of computers.
There are other examples of my lab puttering, including ones that led to radical career-shifts. I crafted an impressive PC personal-psychiatrist computer program called SENSAI over a period of more than a year in the late 1980s, working late nights at home after my regular consulting job. That led me to a career shift to where I was founding COO and Chief Scientist of Mirror Systems, a software company.
Fast forwarding to the latest wave of creative physical endeavor, it was repurposing my kitchen into a lab almost 5 years ago where I first I started making our 1st-generation herbal anti-inflammatory goop. I continued to make and improve this precursor, later working with a supplement manufacturer to end up with the 4HerbSynergy supplement we are selling today. The lab equipment included a very powerful Vitamix blender, a 2-quart ultrasound tool cleaner, and a digital micro-scale for measuring ingredients. I have been the primary lab rat. How do I know that it works to control inflammation? All along from the start I have been taking the supplement myself. Two or three times during the 4+ years I went off of it for a period of up to a few weeks – perhaps because I thought I was too busy to make it. Each time I did this, sure enough, I would feel arthritic inflammatory symptoms creeping back, ones like trigger-finger and knee pains. When I got back on the supplement again, these symptoms would go away again. Hmnn! My wife is our 2nd main lab rat. She has been taking the supplement for over 3 years now and also has her own stories about being on and off it. Perhaps 30-40 people have tried our home-made supplement over the years. Many kept asking for more and a secondary motivation for the business is that we had some trouble keeping up with such requests.
For years, we called the home-made stuff “Lipomix.” We shifted over to taking the commercial version, 4HerbSynergy, about 6 weeks ago, but the ultrasound unit still waits on standby in a cardboard box in our living room. That long period of puttering and personal experimentation was critical to developing our 4HerbSynergy product. I would never consider the costs, aggravation and risks of going into a new business without feeling a strong familiarity with a supplement product and knowing that it really works for me and others. I got that through our kitchen lab work.
Life for me continues to be an adventure requiring constant learning
As do all other human beings, I face many challenges and questions born of uncertainty like:
- Can I maintain my health and full vitality for another 10, 20, 30 years or even longer? All history suggests the answer is certainly NO for the longer periods. My science background suggests “Perhaps, it is worth a try. Keep after it and we will see.” The part of me that practices reality creation says “Yes, sure, that is already settled.” Again, for insight into this part of me you can read my treatise ON BEING AND CREATION, and have a look at the associated ON BEING AND CREATION blog.
- Can I help build up sales for our new 4hebsynergy business to the point where the business is viable? Clearly, this challenge is of our own making, but it is necessitating a lot of new behavior taking me outside my comfort zone. It is requiring me to interact differently with many new people and learn a lot more about the dietary supplement industry – and how electronic media marketing can be utilized for our business. In other words, I just signed up for an Entrepreneurial University-level education
- Can I simultaneously build a new business and all that it entails, further myself as role of sage and blog-writer in the area of longevity science, continue to deepen my insights into the nature of reality, and do the other things required for me to lead a full and happy family and social life? I really don’t know but based on my faith in reality creation, I say YES, certainly.
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- THE STATEMENTS IN THIS BLOG ENTRY HAVE NOT BEEN REVIEWED OR APPROVED BY THE FDA. THE DIETRY SUPPLEMENT MENTIONED HERE IS NOT INTENDED FOR THE DIAGNOSIS, PREVENTION OR TREATMENT OF ANY DISEASE.FROM TIME TO TIME, THIS BLOG MAY DISCUSS RESEARCH DEVELOPMENTS RELATING TO DISEASE PROCESSES. THE INTENTION OF THOSE DISCUSSIONS IS TO CONVEY CURRENT RESEARCH FINDINGS AND OPINIONS, NOT TO GIVE MEDICAL ADVICE. THE INFORMATION IN POSTS IN THIS BLOG IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR A LICENSED PHYSICIAN’S MEDICAL ADVICE. IF ANY ADVICE, OPINIONS, OR INSTRUCTIONS HEREIN CONFLICT WITH THAT OF A TREATING LICENSED PHYSICIAN, DEFER TO THE OPINION OF THE PHYSICIAN. THIS INFORMATION IS INTENDED FOR PEOPLE IN GOOD HEALTH. IT IS THE READER’S RESPONSIBILITY TO KNOW HIS OR HER MEDICAL HISTORY AND ENSURE THAT ACTIONS OR SUPPLEMENTS HE OR SHE TAKES DO NOT CREATE AN ADVERSE REACTION.
That’s a very nice article. It would have needed some proof reading as a few minor mistakes have crept in, but that did not keep me from enjoying it.
I am following you for quite some time now and it’s great to see that you decided to become a craftsman. Unfortunately i can not buy your supplement here in germany, shipping is only inside the US. So i hope that your efforts get rewarded enough so that you can expand that business :).
I do have a question: What’s your oppinion about the whole NAD-story and David Sinclair? NAD supplements (NMN and NR) seem to be good, people posting positive results. Problem is that good doses are pretty expensive at the moment. I would like to get your point of view about all of this.
Hi Pyrion
Thanks for your comments. I do think there is a great deal of importance for David Sinclair and others studies of NAD+ and possible promotion of supplements that increase NAD+ levels. Please see the blog entries I have published here on the topic, the “NAD World” articles.
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Hi Vince-
I’m a long time reader of your blogs but first timer to log on to comment.
A couple of questions about the supplements you take:
(1) It seems you take a great deal of supplements a day. In one blog, you list several dozens that you take every day. I wonder if you do liver and kidney check periodically to make sure you have no problems with the liver and kidney that you cannot feel yourself;
(2) if I were going to only take 4 supplements on your list (the 4-herb is one), which four will they be?
(3) I looked through the 4-herb synergy you have for sale, and somewhere there, you indicate you’re not aware of any drugs the 4-herb synergy could interfere with. I wonder if it is safe to take it by someone who is taking blood thinners as all or some of those 4 herbs are known to have blood thinning effect. Did you happen to consult with a doctor? I’m thinking to recommend the 4-herb to a relative but I know he’s taking blood thinner.
Thanks for your time
Dear Joe
Regarding your questions.
1. I may do kidney and liver checks every year or two. Never any problem and I evolve my regimen slowly and in adding any new supplement seek first to identify any potential side effects.
2, This is a tough question – like asking if you were to add only 4 fluids to your car, which ones would you pick? I am sure some important fluids would be left out like auto transmission fluid and windshield wiper fluid.
Among the most important supplements, I would include green tea extract. High DHA fish oil supplements, DHEA – and there are many moe of near-equal important. I know of no contra-indication for any of the key ingredients in 4 Herb Synergy for people taking blood thinners, but there may be such. I would consult with the prescribing physician.
Vince
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