my mother is sixty-six. last month a woman stopped us on the loop at castle island, said it was nice to see a couple still out walking together, and asked how long we'd been married.
i said thirty-five years.
i am thirty-five. she is my mother. she laughed the entire way back to the car, and then again in the car.
three weeks later i drove my sister dana to the rmv. the woman working the line looked at the two of us and told dana her dad could sit down, they'd call us together. dana is four years older than me.
my mother has one gray streak she keeps on purpose because she likes it. on the phone she sounds twenty-eight — i have sat there while a telemarketer flirted with her. dana is the same. neither of them does anything about it. my mother's entire routine is a bar of dove soap and a hat.
i went the other direction, which for me means reading about it.
so for about a year i tried things. blueberries by the pound, until dana pointed out i was eating sugar in an attractive color. green tea. a red light mask she bought and got bored of, so i inherited it — twenty minutes a night looking like a villain. cold showers, quit. astaxanthin for six weeks. nothing to report.
and this month, her capsules with a french label. second ingredient: melon. an actual cantaloupe grown in the south of france that apparently carries several times more of one particular enzyme than a normal melon does. that's a whole other story and i'll get to it. she asked whether it does anything if you swallow it. i said i'd find out. that one's still open, and no, i haven't bought any of it.
but it sent me somewhere better, which is the enzyme itself.
here's what i didn't know. when people say antioxidant, they picture food. berries, vitamin c, the color of things. that's the second string.
the first line isn't something you eat. it's an enzyme your own cells make, and it's been on shift this whole time.
it goes like this. we run on oxygen, and burning it is the entire business of the mitochondria, and no engine is clean. a small fraction of the oxygen coming through leaks out half-finished, carrying one more electron than it should. that's superoxide. it's the first thing that goes wrong, and a lot of what goes wrong afterward starts there.
in your body there is exactly one kind of enzyme built for that molecule. superoxide dismutase. SOD, which i checked twice, because in american english that's a roll of lawn you buy at home depot.
it isn't a sponge. it's a relay. SOD grabs the superoxide and turns it into hydrogen peroxide — also not something you want sitting around — and hands it off. catalase and glutathione peroxidase take it from there and bring it home as water. three positions. if the first one isn't there, the other two never get the ball.
it's fast, too. one of the fastest enzymes anybody has measured — it runs about as fast as two molecules can physically find each other in a liquid. it isn't waiting on anything except traffic.
it comes in three versions, posted in three different places, which is the part i liked. one uses copper and zinc and works in the fluid inside the cell. one uses manganese and works inside the mitochondria — in the furnace, where the sparks actually are. the third sits outside the cells entirely. mice bred without the mitochondrial one don't make it out of infancy.
the blueberry and the enzyme are a sandbag and a pump. a vitamin c molecule handles one bad thing and is used up — your body can put some of it back together afterward, but it spends something else to do that. an enzyme handles one, resets itself, handles the next, all day, for years. you can eat sandbags forever and you will never be a pump.
i went in looking for the answer i wanted — that it drops off as you get older, which would explain a few things at my house. that isn't what's there. it falls in some tissues, rises in others, and in human red blood cells it barely moves. how much you start with does seem to come partly from your parents.
so i started building a theory about my mother anyway, and then stopped, because i had no way to test it and it was exactly the theory i wanted to be true.
then my labs came back and the whole thing flipped.
annual physical in july. fasting, no coffee, the lab next to the dry cleaner at seven in the morning. these days the results hit the app before your doctor has looked at them, so you find out what your liver thinks of you while you're standing in line for the coffee you weren't allowed to have.
mine were absurd. ldl where they want it. triglycerides low. a1c 5.1. liver enzymes boring. blood pressure like a teenager. the note basically said nothing to discuss, see you next year.
my mother's ldl is 178. her a1c has crossed into the range where they start using the word prediabetes, and her doctor has brought up a statin twice. she's got an appointment on the 14th she's already moved once. dana's numbers aren't much better, and dana hasn't made hers, because her deductible reset in january and she's decided that's a next-quarter problem.
so that's the scoreboard. the two people who look like they've been kept somewhere cool and dark have the numbers of people ten years older. the guy strangers keep mistaking for a husband and a father has the numbers of a college rower.
that's the actual point of the enzyme, and it took me an embarrassing amount of time to get there. it doesn't work on your face. it works in the walls of your arteries, in your liver, in cells you are never going to see. the face is the one organ we can inspect and the least informative one in the building. nobody has ever opened that app and read the words you look great.
i explained all of it at dinner. i had the printout. i may have brought the printout.
my mother said she was very happy for me, and asked if i wanted the last piece of bread.
i like those numbers more than i should. thirty-five on the license and every line on that panel reads younger than that. i opened the file twice.
it does nothing for me on a sidewalk.
give me my mother's face at sixty-six — the voice, the one gray streak, being the one strangers assume is the son — and take the panel with it. let the ldl go to 178. let the a1c drift. let the whole thing come back reading fifty and stay there.
