Welcome everyone. This is Dr. Mercola helping you take control of your health and today we have the honor of having Dr. Bruce Ames and many of you may have heard it before, especially if you're involved in science because he developed the famous Ames test, which is a systems for easily and cheaply testing the mutagenicity of compounds and it's widely used. He is currently

professor of biochemistry and molecular biology emeritus at the

University of California at Berkeley and he's a senior scientist at Children's Hospital

in Oakland Research Institute.

So welcome, and thank you for joining us today.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Yes, likewise.

So today we're going to, you published many, many articles, but you've taken a shift in recent

years from your work in mutagenicity and have really focused on prolonging healthy aging and you wrote an article in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that was published in October on longevity vitamins and proteins.

So I'd like to discuss that with you now because in that paper you propose that the that

the optimal level of many of vitamins,

you discuss about 30 or so of the essential vitamins and minerals,

and about 11 others may not be what that's the

optimal level for those vitamins may not be sufficient for longevity is the levels required to diminish disease may not be the same as to optimize longevity.

So maybe if we can start there and you can expand on that.

So back in 2006 I was getting interested in vitamins.

I worked on mitochondria, which are the organelles in the cell, which make all your ATP, the high energy molecule that drives your metabolism, but one of the side effects is it bleeds out

oxidants and oxidants are mutagenic they can damage DNA among and they can damage

protein and other things just like radiation radiation the some of the same substances come from your own mitochondra.

And it decays with age.

Anyway, I was thinking, gee, of Vitamin C and Vitamin E

do all those good things.

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