Chapter 1: Reversing the Body's Aging, for Astronauts and for You
We ever long for visions of beauty, We ever dream of unknown worlds.
-- MAXIM GORKY
Astronauts will soon travel to Mars, a cold planet half the size of Earth, located more than 250 million miles away. No trip into space will have taken so long. No expedition will have involved such exhaustive, integrated preparation. As a society, we might react to the news of this incredible journey with awe and pride. Correctly, we would think of this adventure as the achievement of one of our greatest goals.
For me, however, there will be something more. For me, there will be a different kind of exhilaration, one that comes from the fulfillment of one's own goals. You see, the secondary benefit of the successful journey to Mars is the impact it will have on the struggle to reverse the aging process here on Earth.
The extensive plans for this three-year round-trip Martian voyage are well under way, and they entail the most comprehensive scientific preparation for any journey ever attempted. That is because prolonged space flight in microgravity -- that's the word for almost zero gravity -- results in remarkable physical changes within the body which are astonishingly similar to our journey into old age. Traveling into old age is a damaging process we want to stop and reverse, especially as it concerns our muscles and bone.
Weeks into their Martian adventure, the astronauts' muscle cells will atrophy. Some will be lost forever as these space travelers become as weak as most eighty-year-olds. Calcium will be leached from their bones at a greatly accelerated rate. Normal bone growth will be upset, leaving their bones pitted with craters and liable to fracture. Imagine the bones as being like a wool sweater that has been eaten by moths. The astronauts' balance will be extremely compromised. Their blood volume will be reduced, and their heart muscle will shrink. Their immune systems will be upset, and minor infections may pose major threats. Their bodies will be bombarded by radiation, greatly increasing the risk of cancer.
Turning Back the Clock
My job over the past few years has been to find effective ways to prevent the premature aging of the Mars-bound astronauts. As head of the Nutrition, Physical Fitness, and Rapid Rehabilitation Team of the National Space Biomedical Research Institution (NSBRI), I have been working on a program to prevent the astronauts from experiencing a physical deterioration equivalent to more than thirty years of aging on their journey to and from the Red Planet. The ultimate goal is to have a crew of astronauts land on Mars in great physical shape, with muscles and bones as strong and powerful as they were at liftoff nine months earlier -- and to have them return to Earth in the same physical condition.
The good news is that a way to do this has been found. I can now share with you an age-reversal program that works for astronauts and will work for you. What I am proposing is revolutionary: a program that will allow all of us on Earth to take control of how quickly or slowly we age. The program is called AstroFit.
In my "Mars" laboratory at the Donald W. Reynolds Center on Aging at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, I have been able to simulate a speeded-up aging process in order to see exactly what happens to muscle, bone, balance, and overall fitness. What normally takes place over the span of a lifetime, I can now observe happening in weeks, using as my test subjects healthy, active people in their twenties, thirties, and forties. My research has documented the advancement of aging, characterized by specific breakdowns and changes that occur in the human body in weightless conditions. In my lab, I am seeing what will happen to the astronauts on their journey to and from Mars.
As I became more involved in my NASA project, and the relationship between space aging and Earth aging became more apparent to me, I knew I needed to write this book. I wanted to share the AstroFit program with a wide audience so that it could have a significant and important impact on aging for all of us. Using special muscle- and bone-building exercises I call E-Centrics, I can ensure that the Mars-bound astronauts will successfully withstand the serious health risks that will face them. With special weight resistance training, they will learn how to protect their bodies from rapid aging.
By using a slightly modified version of the same program, you too can achieve age reversal, no matter what your age, no matter what your current physical condition. In this book you have the latest scientifically based information needed to forestall aging. Using the same research-based AstroFit program I have designed for the astronauts on the way to Mars, you, too, can achieve comparable protection and age reversal -- no matter what your age. I've seen this happen firsthand so many times already, not only in my test subjects, but also in friends and family members who have followed the AstroFit plan for ninety days. Thanks to the innumerable breakthroughs that have come out of the NASA-sponsored research in my laboratory, and from other NASA labs around the country, we now have the means to stay younger and more vital for longer than at any other period in human existence.
Unhealthy Adaptations in Space
The Mars mission is now among NASA's top priorities, and a large contingent of dedicated NASA administrators and scientists around the globe is working to make this dream a reality within the decade. I've had the privilege of working with many of them over the years while conducting my studies in human physiology. The ultimate goal of our collective research is to allow the crew of highly trained astronauts to switch on the afterburners of their spacecraft and gently ease it onto the dusty red surface of Mars. But how will a journey that will take three years -- nine months going, eighteen months exploring the planet, and nine months returning home -- and involve such exhaustive and integrated physical preparation of the astronauts be possible? More important, how will the astronauts, albeit highly trained and superbly conditioned, be able to survive the incredible physical rigors of this 500-million-mile roundtrip voyage?
I'm sure you've seen television clips of astronauts just back from outer space, unable to walk on their own after only a ten-day mission. For Mars-bound astronauts, the debilitation could be far worse. In traveling to Mars, these once healthy men and women could become old in every sense of the word -- and at high risk of dying, either on Mars or later, after they arrive back home.
Muscle atrophy is a serious problem for astronauts in space and it progresses rapidly the longer they're aloft. On Earth, our muscles maintain some of their size and strength when we go about our daily chores, but they really begin to grow when we exercise them with weights. In the microgravity of space -- which spacelings encounter within nine minutes of liftoff from Earth -- the leg muscles soon become weakened from lack of use because astronauts "float" instead of walk and the leg muscles are no longer needed. The body senses that immediately and begins to rid itself of the muscle. To move in any direction, all the astronauts have to do is push with their arms against a fixed object, such as the wall of the spacecraft.
In this new environment, the large, powerful back muscles, which make up the most muscle tissue in the body, are suddenly free of all the load-bearing stresses experienced on Earth, and they, too, immediately begin to weaken. Although the skeletal muscles continue to control and move the body in space, the muscle fibers become significantly smaller in the absence of gravity. They also begin to alter, changing from slow-twitch fibers, which were once useful for support against gravity, to fast-twitch fibers, which are more useful for pushing. For every week an astronaut remains in space, his muscles typically shrink by 2 to 3 percent.
While weightlessness seems like everyone's dream of how to maneuver through life without much physical expenditure, it's actually a medical nightmare of gigantic proportions. Due to the extensive loss of muscle and bone that occurs, living in microgravity could turn the astronauts into old men and women decades before their time. Without taking proper countermeasures during the flight to Mars, they would arrive in an extremely weakened state. Stepping onto the Martian soil outfitted in their bulky space suits, they'd be so weak that even the most minor physical activity would seem difficult. They'd be too fatigued to turn the screwdriver needed to construct their prefabricated modular Martian dwelling. And with virtually no muscle power left, venturing out to explore and gather rock and mineral samples would be impossible.
Returning once again to the gravitational pull of Earth, the astronauts -- once supremely conditioned forty- and fifty-year olds -- would be transformed into the equivalent of slow-moving, infirm seventy- and eighty-year olds. Weak, dizzy, nauseated, and incapable of walking a straight line, their very survival would be jeopardized.
As an exercise scientist, I closely study people as they walk, run, swim, and lift heavy objects. I also examine them when they're sedentary and doing nothing more than clicking the TV remote control. Through my work on the Mars project, I've found that after an extended orbit of several weeks, astronauts suffer many of the same health problems that I see in our sedentary, aging population. They become weak, unstable on their feet, and extremely limited in what they can do. Ironically, what's happened to them is that their bodies have successfully adapted to life without gravity, only to find that these adaptations are quite harmful once back on Earth.
The human body is masterfully resilient. For thousands of years, it has withstood the rigors of famine, war, and natural disasters by adapting to its surrou...
