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Grow A New Body


 Living to 100 in an enjoyable fashion means working on your body’s unique capacity for regeneration.  

Five key supplements (c) Kayla Maurais/Unsplash

Today you should plan on living to the age of 100 and budget accordingly for it. You don’t want to spend the last 20 years of your life bed-ridden or unable to remember your grandchildren’s names. You want to spend those years in vibrant health; taking your humour, vitality, sexuality, and good health into the last days of your life.   

When Swiss bank UBS surveyed its clients and asked them how much of their fortune they would be willing to spend, to have an extra 10 years of healthy life, those worth US$50 million or more indicated they would be willing to part with as much as half of their fortune for that extra decade.  

The intersection of modern medicine and biotechnology means that we are focusing not only on repair of damage to the body but on regeneration. To get your health-span to equal your lifespan, firstly you have to detoxify, and that that means breaking the Standard American Diet. The average US citizen eats 200lb of sugar and 185lb of bread and pasta that turns into sugar. This ‘white poison’ is deadly for your health. 

Then comes repair. You can grow a new body and brain but you don’t want to start in your 80s, or when you have been given a bad diagnosis, but now, when you are in decent health. There are certain ‘power plants’ like turmeric or broccoli sprouts which ‘switch on’ the longevity chains inside every cell, they switch on anti-oxidant systems, and cells regenerate surprisingly quickly in the right conditions. Your liver is only five months old; liver surgeons have long known you can cut off 80 percent of a person’s liver and it will grow back in two months. Your heart is 15-20 years old. For many years, researchers believed that the heart did not regenerate itself. Recently we have discovered that there are clusters of stem cells throughout the heart, and that we actually grow a new heart (and repair existing damage) four to five times during the course of our lives.  

Dr. Alberto Villoldo

We know we can avoid dementia and Alzheimer’s. Together with neuroplasticity, the ability of other regions of the brain to pick up skills and function from damaged areas, we know that we can take our brain health with us for the rest of our lives. 

Dr. Villoldo shares the five essential supplements for longevity.  

Vitamin D-3 is a master hormonal regulator, a way of taking the power of the sun into every cell. Together with DHA (Omega 3) reduces your risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s.  

Tumeric an ancient spice red for 5,000 years by Ayurveda in India. Switches on the SIRT longevity genes. 

Broccoli sprouts (you sprout at home) also switch on the longevity genes and silences more than 200 genes that create disease.  Its active ingredient, sulforaphane, is one everyone’s radar as a cancer preventive substance. 

DHA, one of the Omega -3’s, turns on the production of stem cells inside the brain repairing the hippocampus, responsible for learning and regulating stress. 

NAD is essential for the production of cellular energy and declines rapidly with age. Perhaps the most important longevity molecule being studied (and taken orally) by scientists.  

 Alberto Villoldo PhD is the author of 20 best-selling books including Grow a New Body and One Spirit Medicine. He is the medical director of the Grow a New Body programme at select Six Senses Hotels and Spas and has been on the faculties of the University of California and Columbia University in New York. He recently spoke at biannual wellness festival Harvest Kaplankaya, on the subject of The Mind of God, the Brain of Man, the Heart of the Shaman.