Two Compounds That Reduce Cancer and Ageing

What is senescence? Don’t you just love learning new words? I certainly do, and it’s great to throw them into conversation when they are relevant, of course, and see the puzzled look on other’s faces.

Being in food and nutrition marketing and having a background in pharmaceuticals has given me many opportunities to confound the wise in many meetings without doing it to show off, but because I really have a very inquisitive mind for health and nutrition, amongst other things.

I recall a time when working at a pharmaceutical company and presenting the history of a natural compound and its benefits to skin care, and I mentioned the words ‘Maleleuca Alternifolia’ well that silenced the meeting room, I suddenly had everyone’s attention, all that I wanted to inform them about is the history and origin of Tea Tree Oil, it was an active in one of our products.

Well, senescence is a really important word because according to the Cambridge English dictionary, they define it as:

‘the fact of becoming older, and therefore being in less good condition and less able to function well:’

So senescence may sound ‘serene’ and roll off the tongue but it’s not exactly something any of us look forward to.

You could use this word to insult someone nicely, and if they don’t know what you mean, they may just smile and thank you.

Picture the scene: An elderly gentleman or lady backs into your car without looking in the parking lot. Rather than get emotional and abusive verbally you can smile at them and say. “Oh, not to worry, you are just increasing in senescence.”

I have nothing against the elderly. It’s just that this has almost happened to me on a number of occasions. Bless the elderly, they deserve our respect and support.

They say that a true sign of class is insulting people and having them agree with you.

But I digress, senescence is something we all would like to avoid and delay as long as possible. With senescence comes degeneration and disease, horrible afflictions like cancer and alzheimers.

So how do we slow senescence?

There are two compounds that scientific studies have shown that can delay senescence of your body, but promote senescence or deterioration of cancer cells. Senescence is good when it happens to cancer cells.

Cell death is not good, but when it happens to cancer cells, it is good.

What are these two compounds and how do we get more of them?

Vitamin E and particularly toctrienols have shown powerful action in reducing the risks of fat buildup in the arteries, which leads to heart problems, one of the biggest killers in the world, if not the biggest killer.

Tocotrienols stop cell death essentially and act as a strong antioxidant.

Now making cells increase their senescent response towards cancer cells is important but these compounds need to be selective about doing this because we don’t want them killing off healthy cells, which will speed up ageing.

Quercetin and tocotrienols powerfully combine as actives that work to kill of cancer cells but protect the healthy cells of the body. They cause the deterioration of the cancer cells through senescence and delay senescence in healthy body cells.

What foods can we find these powerful compounds in?

Toctrienols are found in vegetable oils and flaxseed oil, rye, rice bran oil and oats, hazelnuts and maize and olive oil, poppyseed oil and sunflower oil.

What foods contain quercetin?

Red onion is the highest vegetable source of quercetin, but quercetin is available in grapes, red apples, cherries, tomatoes, berries and citrus fruits, bell peppers, green and black tea.

One other note about quercetin, it acts as a shuttle service like an ‘Uber’ for zinc into the cells of the body and as we know zinc is a strong antiviral which is important with the current state of world health.

So include more of the above two compounds and food sources to fight off cancer and slow down the ageing process.