As you grow older, your body becomes stiffer, less elastic, and less agile. This is due to cross-linking at a molecular level. You become stiffer for the same reason that old rubber becomes brittle and stiff—your large structural molecules such as collagen (an important protein in connective tissues) are
welded together by cross-links. This process starts early; babies are so flexible that they can suck their toes, but an Olympic gymnast ends her competitive career before the age of 20 due to progressive loss of flexibility. We sadly watched Mikhail Baryshnikov, the superb ballet dancer, as he talked on television. about the end of his dancing career, which he reached
before the age of 35, he says, because of loss of flexibility. It is possible, using the right nutrients, to greatly slow the cross-linking process.
You can roughly measure the cross-linking in your skin and in the skin of your friends without any equipment at all. Place the wrist and hand palm down on a flat surface with the fingers stretched as widely as possible (Figure 1). Take a pinch of skin on the back of the hand between your thumb and forefinger and pull it up as far as you comfortably can. Hold the
pinched skin for five seconds and suddenly release it. (See Figure 2). The skin will:snap back very rapidly in a healthy teenager. In an 80-year-old, the pinched skin may still form a visible ridge five minutes later. (See Figures 3, 4, and 5, each taken at a slightly later moment. Figure 5 was taken roughly
Y, second after the pinched skin was released. A quick eye can see that our skin snaps back slightly slower than that of a teenager.) The faster the skin snaps back, the less the undesirable cross-linking. We are both 37 years old, but our skin snapback is roughly like that of someone in their early 20s. If
you slow the rate of cross-linking damage, your tissues can slowly—over a period of years—eliminate a considerable amount of the damage previously done. It takes a long time, however, because structural tissues like collagen are replaced very slowly, and cross-linking slows this natural repair even
further.
Many safe nutrients can slow cross-link formation, including cysteine (a sulfur-containing amino acid); vitamins A, B-1, B-5, B-6, C, E, and PABA; the minerals zinc and selenium; and others, but the proper doses must be used: Too high an intake of cysteine, A, or selenium can be harmful, whereas insufficient amounts of these substances will be ineffective.
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