Marc Joseph Nutrition - Blog

In a recent Canadian study, a research team led by Dr. Eric Frombonne, Director of Pediatric Psychiatry at The Montreal Children’s Hospital, found no difference in mercury in the blood and hair samples obtained from autistic children and their mothers relative to samples from non-autistic children and their mothers.

Frombonne and his team concluded:

• Autism is not a form of mercury poisoning.
• “Chelation therapies, whereby heavy metals are removed from the body using specific compounds , are not useful in the treatment of autism. Chelation has never been proved efficacious as a biomedical intervention to treat autism.”

We can all go home now. Nothing at all to see here. Move along.

What They Didn’t Tell You

As it turns out, though, it’s a little more complicated than that.

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“We just fall apart,” Felix Silverstone, former senior geriatrician at New York’s Parker Jewish Institute, declares in an interesting New Yorker article on aging that’s definitely worth a read.

Aging is something we’ll all have to deal with sooner or later, whether with helping our parents or ourselves, and the article raises many of the key issues worth considering.

Why We Age

First up is the contentious question of why we age:

[S]cientists do not believe that our life spans are actually programmed into us. After all, for most of our hundred-thousand-year existence—all but the past couple of hundred years—the average life span of human beings has been thirty years or less … Today, the average life span in developed countries is almost eighty years …

… Inheritance has surprisingly little influence on longevity. James Vaupel, of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, in Rostock, Germany, notes that only six per cent of how long you’ll live, compared with the average, is explained by your parents’ longevity; by contrast, up to ninety per cent of how tall you are, compared with the average, is explained by your parents’ height. Even genetically identical twins vary widely in life span: the typical gap is more than fifteen years.

The “wear and tear” model appears much more likely to determine longevity:

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