The Biochemistry Behind The Aging Process

Symptoms of aging can be explained and aren’t really facets of rocket science. How do we make sense of them, though?

Aging is unfortunately an inevitable problem that all of us humans will face. Multiple aspects of our lives can be affected as we age.

Physically, we won’t be able to do things at 60 that we could do at 20. Mentally, we may face cognitive declines.

We tend to associate white hair with a person as a sign of longevity. It makes them look dignified and respectable.

One question, though. How did their hair colour change from black/brown/red/whatever it was to white/silver? What was the biochemical mechanism behind all that?

Another question, too. How did those wrinkles come to pass?

If we analyse it at the cellular level, we may find some clues.

Because what we have in our cells are the mitochondria, which are responsible for generating energy for the cell. They are the cell’s powerhouses. The cell obtains fuel in the form of acetyl-CoA, which can be supplied via fats (ketones) or carbohydrates (glucose).

This acetyl-CoA then goes through a series of electron transfer reactions via the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle.

The electrons that are extracted are channelled through the electron transport chain (ETC) via the activity of Coenzyme Q10:

Ideally, these electrons then get shunted into an oxygen molecule, such that the oxygen molecule gets reduced to a water molecule.

And that’s why we do breathe out water vapour during the respiration process. We’re producing it as we’re generating energy. During periods of intense exercise, we need to generate more energy — and we consequently generate more water vapour too.

That’s the end of the energy generation process. Our cells get energy to function, and everything looks like it’s going on well.

Things that should behave ideally can always go wrong, however.

The problem is that the ETC may not be operating optimally, and the electrons don’t get transferred that properly.

As a result, molecular oxygen may not get completely reduced to water, but it can get partially reduced to the reactive superoxide or hydrogen peroxide forms, which we can term as reactive oxygen species (ROS). This article states that:

The evidence strongly suggests that the electron transport chain, located in the inner mitochondrial membrane, is the major source of reactive oxygen species in animal cells.

The problem being that the ROS, as their name suggests, is reactive.

Hydrogen peroxide, after all, is something that people do use for vanity’s sake. That’s how the derogatory term “peroxide blonde” comes about. If we can use hydrogen peroxide externally to bleach our hair, then what could happen when the cells in our head produce hydrogen peroxide internally?

Would the discolouration of our hair not proceed, too? Eventually, what people do use externally for vanity’s sake can actually be something that their bodies are producing internally under non-ideal conditions.

What happens, then, when we’re producing it in larger than usual quantities? We’d get into a state of oxidative stress, which is defined by this article as:

Oxidative stress is an imbalance between cellular production of reactive oxygen species and the counteracting antioxidant mechanisms. The brain with its high oxygen consumption and a lipid-rich environment is considered highly susceptible to oxidative stress or redox imbalances. Therefore, the fact that oxidative stress is implicated in several mental disorders including depression, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, is not surprising.

And unfortunately, a lot of mental health issues do have oxidative stress as a common problem.

However, we can never escape stress in our lives.

The stress that we do face in our daily lives can be a major precursor towards the development of oxidative stress.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was highlighted by multiple lockdowns and people losing their jobs, it was seen that mental health cases skyrocketed in many parts of the developed world, such as in the United States. We cannot deny that psychological and emotional stress isn’t dealing internal damage to different people just because it remains unseen.

If we’re stressed and our brain is in a state of oxidative stress, we’d be producing more hydrogen peroxide.

That hydrogen peroxide is going to discolour our hair internally, and that gives a stressed person a higher probability of developing greying hair prematurely.

Of course, the hydrogen peroxide can also work elsewhere, such as the collagen proteins that provide structural support for our skin.

When the hydrogen peroxide attacks the collagen and forces the structural support to collapse, we can see it in the form of skin wrinkles.

The skin loses its elasticity, and we’d be looking at the development of premature wrinkles. Which is, as we can tell, a sign of premature aging too.

So it isn’t really rocket science as to why we see stressed people aging prematurely. It is, however, pure biochemistry.

Of course, the “anti-aging” nutrition that we do feed our cells with is key. We’d want to be looking at Coenzyme Q10 and the nuclear respiratory factor 2 (nrf2) pathway as a way to support our cellular functions internally. Highly bioavailable too, of course, because we want the nutrition that we do consume in our diet to actually reach the cells through our blood.

Just so that we can look at reducing the rate of ROS that we’re producing in our bodies!

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