Cellular Health: What is it & Why is it Important?
Published by Dr. Venn-Watson
Dr. Eric Venn-Watson’s Highlights
- Cells are the building blocks of life, and they make up your entire body. They produce new tissues, give our bodies structure, produce energy, and much more.
- As such, we need to protect our cells, and can do so through exercise and maintaining a healthy diet. However, as we age, those cells will still start to break down.
- C15:0, a fatty acid found in fatty15, actually helps to support cellular health and can maintain their walls and prevent the cellular degradation that is so common as we age.
In searching for ways to improve your overall health and wellness, you may have come across the term “cellular health”. Curiosity about cellular health is a good thing, and you’ve come to the right place to learn about what it is, why it’s so important, and how focusing on your overall health and wellness from a cellular standpoint can improve your quality of life.
Let’s start with the basics.
What Are Cells and Why Are They So Important?
You likely remember the little diagrams of cells and their structures (organelles) from grade school. A cell is the basic building block of all living things. Your entire body is made up of over seventy-five trillion cells. Cells form tissues, tissues form organs, and organs form systems that make up your body. In order for our organs and systems (and ultimately our entire bodies) to function properly, our cells must first function properly. In fact, everything that happens in our bodies begins on a cellular level.
Our cells have six main functions:
- Cells provide support and structure. Every tissue that makes up an organ is composed of tissue-specific cells that give structure to these particular organs.
- Cells reproduce to form new tissue. Healthy cells reproduce more healthy cells. This process is called mitosis.
- Cells allow nutrients in and waste out. Through processes called passive and active transport, cells take in nutrients they need to carry out cellular function.
- Cells produce energy. Every vital process your body carries out happens because of chemical reactions being carried out inside your cells.
- Cells carry out metabolism. Metabolic processes start in your cells. Metabolism is the breakdown of nutrients and a complex series of chemical reactions inside the cells which ultimately keep us alive.
- Cells aid in reproduction. Through either mitosis or meiosis, the cells of an organism determine how it will procreate.
- Our cells are the foundation of every health and wellness concern. As such, it’s pretty important that our cells are operating at the highest and healthiest level possible.
What Is Cellular Health?
Simply put, cellular health is the determination of how well our cells are functioning overall. As we age, our cells become more fragile and don’t work as well as they used to. This breakdown in our cells is what causes aging, and this process can leave us feeling tired or like we’re not quite at our best.
Our cells are also susceptible to oxidative damage due to free radicals. Antioxidants help protect your body from free radical damage. Free radicals are unbalanced molecules that steal electrons from other cells and create cellular damage.
Antioxidants protect against oxidative stress by giving one of their electrons, so your cells don’t have to.
When cells begin to breakdown, several things happen:
- Our metabolism slows. Our cells function to help regulate metabolism, including keeping glucose and cholesterol at healthy levels. As we age, our cellular response to nutrients can become impaired, affecting our body weight, glucose levels, and lipid (fat) metabolism.
- Our immune system becomes unbalanced. Cell function declines and cell signaling becomes abnormal as our cells age. Mixed signaling at the cellular level can cause problems with our immune system and affect our overall health.
- Our cells (including our red blood cells) become more fragile. As we age, our cells, including our red blood cells, become more fragile and lose some of their function. As a result, we can be at risk for anemia, which can make us feel tired and weak.
- Waste buildup occurs in our cells. Our cells begin to lose their ability to efficiently remove waste from inside the cell walls. The buildup of cellular waste creates the opportunity for cells to further function abnormally, which can lead to problems like liver disease.
Obviously, we want to avoid unhealthy cells and the premature biological aging of our cells if at all possible. We want our cells to be strong and efficient at housekeeping so that our tissues stay healthy and we keep our bodies feeling as good as possible.
While eating a balanced diet, exercising, and maybe taking a multivitamin can help, there is more that we can do.
How Can We Improve Cellular Health?
We’re all chasing better health and attempting to take action to keep doing the things we love.
Playing with our kids and grandkids, running a 5k, hiking with our significant other (including our four-legged friends), working efficiently until retirement, and staying sharp are all things we love or have loved to do.
Every year, we’re at risk of losing just a bit more of these abilities, and unless we become more proactive about our cellular health, we can very quickly find ourselves losing critical pieces of our overall quality of life.
With the exception of eating a healthy diet and exercising, we’ve been pretty limited on what else we can do to improve our health on a cellular level in terms of keeping our cells functioning like they did when we were younger. Now, there’s evidence that a trace saturated fatty acid called C15:0 (or pentadecanoic acid) can significantly promote cellular resilience, thereby increasing our overall health. This new discovery is aiming to help us age on our own terms.
This simple fatty acid can revolutionize the way your cells can stay healthy with age. C15:0 (in fatty15) can:*
- Strengthen cell membranes. C15:0 gets into our cell membranes and serves as armor for our cells to keep them healthy and protected.
- Boost our mitochondria. You remember your cell’s mitochondria as the “powerhouse” of the cell. As we age, our mitochondria become weaker, decreasing our cells' energy output and increasing cellular stress and the risk of cellular fragility syndrome.
- Balanced immunity and improved metabolism. Our immune system and metabolism can become unbalanced over time. By activating key regulators of our metabolism and immune system, science supports that C15:0 can help bring back the balance which keeps our cells and bodies running better.
Elevate your cells. Elevate your self.
What Are the Benefits of Improving Cellular Health?
Improving our cellular health improves us. It’s so important to ensure our cells don’t age faster than they have to so that in turn, we do not age faster than we have to. Improving our cellular health can improve:
- Immune health. Improved cellular health restores your cells’ regulation of your immune system and keeps it under control and in check.
- Metabolic health. When our cells are healthy, they signal properly, which allows us to sustain healthy glucose, cholesterol, and body weights.
- Red blood cell health. When our red blood cells are strong, they function longer, keeping our oxygen-carrying cells happy and keeping us energized.
- Liver fitness. Improved cellular health helps keep your liver working as it should. Because the liver is the organ that filters toxins out of our blood, it’s vital to our overall health for it to function properly.
How Can a Supplement Support Cellular Health?
In order to understand how a supplement can provide cellular health support, we have to understand what our cells need to function properly. We know that our cells need essential fatty acids to survive. Fatty acids provide many health benefits for our cells, from protecting the cell membranes to helping the mitochondria provide energy.
We’re already familiar with two essential fatty acids that our cells require: omega-3 (especially alpha-linolenic acid) and omega-6 (especially linoleic acid). Now, for the first time in 90 years, there’s mounting evidence that another fatty acid, C15:0, is also essential for our cellular health.
Unfortunately, the sources of this fatty acid have been effectively vilified for the past 40 years, as we’ve been told that the key to a healthy diet was reduction of all saturated fats, especially those found in whole fat dairy products. While this change may be helping a sect of the population already suffering from heart disease, the inadvertent side effect was a decrease of all saturated fats across all diets, including those of our kids.
We were told that things like whole milk and full fat butter were bad, so we began to drink skim milk and slather margarine on our toast. Despite decreasing our whole fat dairy intake, we began seeing health problems like type 2 diabetes, obesity, liver disease, and cardiovascular disease in younger and younger people.
It ends up, not all saturated fats are created equal. An increasing body of science now supports that C15:0, an odd-chain saturated fatty acid present in dairy fat, is a good fat. In fact, increases in obesity, type 2 diabetes, and liver disease over the past 20 years are associated with a decrease in the amount of C15:0 in our diets.†
It’s time to get healthy, odd-chain saturated fat back into our diets to improve our cellular health, and help protect our bodies against age-related breakdown that can rob us of our health and vitality.*
Fatty15 provides a pure powder form of C15:0 to support your essential cellular health in just one easy to swallow capsule a day.* The fatty15 supplement is:*
- Vegan-friendly. You don’t have to compromise your dietary standards to protect your cells. Fatty15 is vegan-friendly and contains just one ingredient, C15:0 (aka FA15), nothing else.
- Sustainable, right down to the packaging. Instead of single-use plastic bottles commonly used for dietary supplements, we use reusable glass bottles to contain your capsules, and you only ever need one. The cap is made from bamboo, which is one of the fastest growing plants on the planet. When it’s cut for production, it grows back quickly.
- Effective. Just one capsule a day can help support your overall health and wellness, and give you the ability to age on your own terms.
- Free from common allergens. Fatty15 is gluten and allergen free and contains no artificial colors, flavors, or dyes.
Keeping your cells healthy and functioning as they should is at the core of healthy aging. You can protect your cells and promote cellular health by adding healthy, C15:0 back to your diet with the fatty15 supplement.* Give the hardest working components of your body the support they deserve with fatty15!
Sources:
https://sciencing.com/six-main-cell-functions-6891800.html
https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/004012.htm
Eric Venn-Watson M.D.
CEO, Co-Founder
Senior Scientist, Co-Founder
Eric is a physician, U.S. Navy veteran, and Co-founder and COO of Seraphina Therapeutics. Eric served over 25 years as a Navy and Marine Corps physician, working with the special forces community to improve their health and fitness. Seraphina Therapeutics is a health and wellness company dedicated to advancing global health through the discovery of essential fatty acids and micronutrient therapeutics.
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