LOWER YOUR AGING MARKERS WITH (AKG)

Lower your aging markers?

AKG? What’s that? Simply said, it’s a chemical that has shown promise in reversing certain aspects of aging. It also does a lot more to improve your life.

Before you get too excited, most of this anti-aging data is produced using animals, especially mice.

Nonetheless, it is promising, and AKG, Alpha-Ketoglutarate, is available in several iterations over the counter. This means it is generally considered safe to use as a supplement, and you don’t need a prescription to buy it.

Thus, we’re discussing something you can easily obtain without jumping through hoops.

Before we go any further, however, it would be good for you to review my article on the hallmarks of aging. It will help you put AKG in perspective. And yes, my posts are written for ordinary readers so that I won’t throw a bunch of biochemistry at you.

(If you’re so inclined, I will provide the appropriate links.)

Note: (I promise not to over-use this clumsy word: Alpha-Ketoglutarate and use AKG instead)

What is AKG, and what will it do for you?

Below is a simplified drawing of the Citric Acid Cycle, also known as the Krebs Cycle. This cycle is integral to producing energy from food and takes place in your mitochondria.

On the lower right of the drawing, you can see that ketoglutarate plays an intermediary role in this critical cycle that ultimately produces adenosine triphosphate, your master energy molecule.

I took biochemistry in college and almost fainted when the professor handed out a complex citric acid cycle diagram and two pages of footnotes. I don’t want that to happen to you, so I dug up this simple drawing to illustrate where AKG fits into the citric acid cycle and your metabolic physiology.

AKG is an intermediary in the production of energy from food. That’s all you need to remember about this cycle.

Krishnabp, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

AKG helps:

Let’s look at these individually:

Mice live longer:

“An alpha-ketoglutarate-supplemented diet extends the lifespan of middle-aged female mice and increases the health span in both sexes. With the simultaneous reduction in frailty and increase in longevity, the intervention compresses morbidity.”

The above link is to a rather long and complex publication that says that supplementing the diets of middle-aged mice helps them live longer and stronger than their peers. This was true in both sexes, but females did slightly better than males.

Now, this does not mean that this same thing will happen in humans, and besides, such a test would take years to accomplish, assuming one could get humans to live in a controlled environment and eat the same food every day for maybe thirty or forty years.

This isn’t going to happen, so you can take it for what it’s worth.

Muscles get stronger:

Well, there is some speculation that AKG helps muscles grow. This is not exactly true, but it does keep them from shrinking and slows atrophy. So, if you are trying to build muscle, AKG helps you in an indirect way by keeping you from losing it.

Now there are many bodybuilders that swear by it, and here is an article that sort of supports their aligance. It seems that heavy resistance exercise increases the levels of AKG in the bloodstream which favors increasing mucle protien and reducing fat.

Putting these two articles together argues for AKG as a strength/body building substance, and somewhat argues for weight lifter’s use of it as a supplement.

Boost your intestinal immune system:

This is a maybe, but a good one. The largest part of your immune system is in your intestines. The study I’m going to link below happens to be done with baby pigs, mostly because they are subject to many intestinal infections, and their digestive system is very similar to that of humans.

With this study, the idea was to supplement the piglet’s diets with AKG to see if this reduced the incidence of their infections. It did.

So the question is, given that most of your immune system originates in your gut, will supplementing with AKG help improve your immune system, and especially if you suffer from frequent infections resulting from a weak immune system.

I’m not saying that this will help strengthen your immune system. I’m just saying it’s worth further invstigation

Create Glutamine:

Now i said I wasn’t going to throw a lot of chemistry at you but here’s just a little AKG can be converted to glutamate, and glutamate can be converted to AKG. This is important because both of these molecules are critical to your metabolism, growth, and healing.

The beauty of these transformations is that both molecules create a reservoir for each other and serve as a balancing mechanism serving your metabolic needs.

Before moving on, here’s a little about the big importance of glutamine.

Treat many medical conditions:

Manage protein production:

“In cellular metabolism, AKG provides an important source of glutamine and glutamate that stimulates protein synthesis, inhibits protein degradation in muscle, and constitutes an important metabolic fuel for gastrointestinal tract cells.”

In plain English, this means that AKG converts to glutamine and glutamate, ultimately creating skeletal muscle (and other types of) protein; it also inhibits muscle loss or wasting (in otherwise healthy subjects).

Simply said, AKG plays a management role in the modulation and homeostasis of proteins, particularly those in skeletal muscles.

What now?

I’ve only scratched the surface.

AKG has an amazing potential in the field of anti-aging. The study with mice just came out recently, and is very promising. You can look for more to come on this molecule and others in the citric acid cycle.

Since AKG is available over the counter, it will not be long before studies are done measuring incremental changes in aging markers under the influence of subjects taking AKG. Timing and dosages will need to be decided, but there’s really nothing in the way of this type of experimentation.

I do not doubt that it is going on right now.

Disclaimer:

I do not take, nor do I recommend that you take AKG. I recommend studying the possible rewards of taking it and making the best decision for yourself.

Personally, I am intrigued by its role in developing cartilage. I will study this further and might include it in a revised publication of my article on Osteoarthritis.

Stay tuned, my friends.

NOTE: FYI, Calcium AKG is the form of AKG used in life-extending mouse experiments.

OMY1

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