The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer

by Elizabeth Blackburn

Aging and death are immutable facts of life, but how we live until our last day is not.

We’ve written this book to put this important information into your hands.

are now pointing strongly toward telomeres as a major culprit.

Telomeres throughout the body shorten as we age, and this underlying mechanism contributes to most diseases of aging.

But telomere attrition is a clear and an early contributor to the aging process, and—more exciting—it is possible to slow or even reverse that attrition.

has led us to a more interconnected view of the world,

Lisa doesn’t think very much about her age, except to be thankful that she’s wiser about life than she used to be.

has to do with the activity inside each woman’s cells.

multi-morbidity, these diseases tend to come in clusters.

The years are increasingly marred by sickness, fatigue, and discomfort.

your health is mostly controlled by your genes. There

but the genetic code determines your risk for heart disease, cancer, and general longevity before you’re even born.

Today there are plenty of people who feel that nurture is more important than nature—that it’s not what you’re born with, it’s your health habits that really count.

The nurture side is more hopeful in its belief that premature aging can be avoided. But

both are critical, and it’s the interaction between the two that matters most.

rates of aging lie in the complex interactions between genes, social relationships and environments, lifestyles, those twists of fate, and especially how one responds to the twists of fate.

lifestyle factors can turn genes on or shut them off.

His words apply not just to weight gain but to most aspects of health.

and we’ll also show you not only how to avoid it but also how to reverse it.

Telomeres, which shorten with each cell division, help determine how fast your cells age and when they die, depending on how quickly they wear down.

aging is a dynamic process that can be accelerated or slowed, and in some aspects even reversed.

but how we age is very much dependent on our cellular health.

To an extent that has surprised us and the rest of the scientific community, telomeres do not simply carry out the commands issued by your genetic code. Your telomeres, it turns out, are listening to you. They absorb the instructions you give them. The way you live can, in effect, tell your telomeres to speed up the process of cellular aging.

In short, one of the keys to a long healthspan is simply doing your part to foster healthy cell renewal.

The cells had a memory!

Hayflick Limit. This is the natural limit that human cells have for dividing, and the stop switch is most likely to be telomeres that have become critically short.

he had discovered a pathway of aging at the cell level.

He found aging was happening on the inside of cells.

Renewing cells include some types of normal cells that can divide,

Many types of cells like stem cells, if kept healthy, have enough telomerase to enable them to keep dividing throughout our life spans, giving us a long healthspan.

Senescent cells can leak proinflammatory substances that make you vulnerable to more pain, more chronic illness. Eventually, many senescent cells will undergo a preprogrammed death.

Many healthy human cells can divide repeatedly, so long as their telomeres (and other crucial building blocks of cells like proteins) remain functional.

This limit on cells dividing is one reason that there seems to be a natural winding down of the human healthspan as we age into our seventies and

eighties,

But sometimes cells don’t make it through all their divisions in the way they should. Sometimes they stop dividing earlier, falling into an old, senescent

stage before their time.

Chronological age is the major determinant of when we get diseases, and this reflects our biological aging inside.

The death rate due to chronic diseases starts to increase after age forty and goes up dramatically after age sixty.

What causes cells to get old before their time?

are like the aglets; they form little caps at the ends of the chromosomes and keep the genetic material from unraveling. They are the aglets of aging. But telomeres tend to shorten over time.

Some of us respond to difficult situations by feeling highly threatened—and this response is linked to shorter telomeres. We can reframe our view of situations in a more positive way. Several mind-body techniques, including meditation and Qigong, have been shown to reduce stress and to increase telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes telomeres.

Exercise that promotes cardiovascular fitness is great for telomeres. We describe two simple workout programs that have been shown to improve telomere maintenance, and these programs can accommodate all fitness levels.

Telomeres hate processed meats like hot dogs, but fresh, whole foo...

Neighborhoods that are low in social cohesion—meaning that people don’t know and trust one another—are bad for telomeres. This is true no matter what the income level. Children who are exposed to several adverse life events have shorter telomeres. Moving children away from neglectful circumstances (such as the notorious Romanian orphanages) can reverse some of the damage. Telomeres on the parents’ chromosomes in the egg and sperm are directly transmitted to the developing baby. Remarkably, this means that if your parents had hard lives that shortened their telomeres, they could have passed those shortened telomeres on to you! If you think that might be the case, don’t panic. Telomeres can build up as well as...

For some people, though, when they have seen and understood the connection between their actions and their telomeres, they are able to make changes that last.

Begin with changes that you can make to your mental habits and then to your body—to the kinds of exercise, food, and sleep routines that are best for telomeres. Then expand outward to determine whether your social and physical environments support your telomere health.

By cultivating your telomeres, you can optimize your chances of living a life that is not just longer but better.

we don’t want more people or their families to suffer the consequences of unnecessary premature cellular aging.

telomeres are among one of the most helpful indicators that we know of right now.

One study has found that people who tend to focus their minds more on what they are currently doing have longer telomeres than people whose minds tend to wander more.