A YOUNGER BRAIN

One difference between younger and older folks is that the former feel “endless possibilities of the future,” while the latter feel the future closing in on them. Time seems repetitive – like being caught in Groundhog Day with Bill Murray. This is a significant drain on one’s mental energy. An openness to the future, on the other hand, creates a youthful mental energy.

Such a feeling of endless possibilities requires new neuronal connections in the brain. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks because the dog’s brain has become static, and has lost the capacity to grow new neurons and to establish new connections between neurons old and new. Now there may be a clever way with quite sophisticated nutrients to regrow new neurons and neuronal connections, literally youthening your brain.

S-adenosylmethionine, or SAM-e for short, is a metabolite of the amino acid methionine. It performs over three dozen functions in your body, among them protecting you from liver disease, osteoarthritis, and depression . Another is to create brain/body chemicals called polyamines , which trigger stem cells in the brain to reproduce and differentiate into neurons in a particular region of the brain called the hippocampus.

This structure is the brain’s “gateway,” through which all information from the senses must pass and where it is prepared for long term storage in various cortical areas. New neurons in the hippocampus means an increased ability to process new information, and process it in new and more complex ways.

In other words, pump enough SAM-e into an old brain and its owner can learn new tricks, new and endless possibilities. This, however, is not easy. Well, it is easy if you do it right.

SAM-e degrades very quickly, so much of it that is sold in various health food stores and supplement supply houses is worthless. It has to be packaged in blister packs and come from an exceedingly reputable source. The best I know of is the Life Extension Foundation . It is pricey and you have to take a lot: 400mg twice a day. And you have to take other stuff with it, such as TMG.

TMG is short for trimethylglycine, which means it has three (tri-) methyl groups (an organic hydrocarbon compound) attached to the amino acid glycine. It “donates” those methyl groups to SAM-e, which allows the brain to recycle it – meaning SAM-e can be used by the brain again and again, not just once. TMG thus greatly increases the efficiency of SAM-e.

There’s a B-type nutrient called choline, which also acts as a methyl donor to SAM-e, and folic acid together with B12, which increases SAM-e activity.

Putting this all together, here are the steps to follow if you want a younger brain:

1. Take one tab of 400mg SAM-e on an empty stomach with a full glass of water first thing in the morning, and again in mid-afternoon (800mg total per day). You want to drink enough water to flush the SAM-e quickly out of the stomach where it will be destroyed by stomach acids.

2. Take one tab of 500mg TMG along with the SAM-e, and an additional 500mg with both breakfast and dinner (2000mg total per day).

3. Take one gram of choline (one tablespoon mixed with water) with breakfast, lunch, and dinner (3 grams total). Also with each meal, take one capsule of folic acid/B12 .

The older you are, the more you may feel over the ensuing days and weeks that your brain feels younger, that you process new information more easily, that you feel less stressed and more optimistic about your life. This is so because your brain will actually be physiologically younger. It’s using modern nutritional science to recapture the spirit of youth.

[Note: The prices of the above nutritional formulas are substantially less if you become a member of the Life Extension Foundation. LEF is in the forefront of the Health Freedom movement, battling the unceasing war of the FDA in collusion with Big Pharma waged upon the nutritional industry.]