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

by Elizabeth Blackburn

Any severe event has the potential to contribute to telomere shortening, if it occurs over years. Exposure alone is not a determinant—your response is important, too, as we discuss in chapter 4. Last,

symptoms that are severe enough to interfere with your daily life—are related.4

Is there someone available to give you good advice about a problem?

Is there someone available whom you can count on to listen to you when you need to talk?

there someone available to you who

shows you love and affection?

Can you count on anyone to provide you with emotional support (talking over problems or helping you make a difficult decision)?

Do you have as much contact as you would like with someone you feel close to, someone in whom you can trust and confide in?

Versions of this questionnaire have been used in studies relating telomere length to social support.6

Almost daily (five or more times a week), I did vigorous activities such as running or riding hard on a bike for 30 minutes or more each time.

if you are fit and do regular exercise, there doesn’t appear to be an upper limit to its benefits as long as you don’t overdo it during workouts and you give yourself recovery time after big workouts.

People who are more physically active appear to be better buffered from the telomere shortening that occurs due to extreme stress than people who are less active.9 Additionally, an intervention showed that exercising forty-five minutes three times a week led to increases in telomerase.10

If you report sleeping at least six hours per night and describe your sleep as good or very good, you’re at low risk.

If you have sleep apnea and do not treat it nightly, you are also at risk.

For omega-3s, food sources are best.

People with higher blood levels of omega-3 fatty acids (DHA, or docosahexaenoic acid, and EPA, or eicosapentaenoic acid) have slower attrition over time.13

it should be sufficient to have fish several times a week, or take a gram of omega-3 oils a day.

those who ate processed meats once a week (or a tiny portion each day)—had shorter telomeres.

we suggest you choose only one area to work on at a time.

Put a reminder of the change you’re trying to make on your bedside table, or set a reminder alarm on your phone to go off at a helpful time of day.

Exercise reduces oxidative stress and inflammation, so it’s not surprising certain exercise programs have also been shown to increase telomerase.

all the signs of overtraining syndrome, an unofficial diagnosis that is characterized by sleep changes, fatigue, moodiness, vulnerability to illness, and physical pain.

Another piece of good news is that telomeres appear to respond powerfully to many different levels and types of exercise.

If exercise is like a drug that pumps wondrous effects through your entire physiology, how does it work?

Calmer, Slimmer, and Better at Fighting Free Radicals: The Cellular Benefits of Exercise People who exercise spend less time in the toxic state known as oxidative stress.

An antioxidant is like a wise friend who says, “Okay, tell me all your bad feelings; I’ll listen and you’ll feel better, but I’m not going to let you make me feel bad, too.

That’s one reason exercise is so valuable. In the short term, exercise actually causes an increase in free radicals.

Most of those oxygen molecules are used to create energy from special chemical reactions in the mitochondria in your cells, but an unavoidable by-product of these vital processes is that some of them also form free radicals.

When you exercise regularly, the cells in your adrenal cortex (located inside your adrenal glands) release less cortisol, the notorious stress hormone. With less cortisol, you feel calmer. With regular exercise, cells throughout your body become more sensitive to insulin, which means your blood sugar is more stable.

If you want to avoid the common midlife trifecta of stress, belly weight gain, and high blood sugar, you need to exercise.

Immunosenescence is an important process underlying increased sickness and malignancy as we age.

people who exercise regularly have lower inflammatory cytokine levels, respond more successfully to vaccinations, and enjoy a more robust immune system.

but people who exercise may be able to delay it until the end of life. As the exercise and immunology researcher Richard Simpson has said, these and other signs “indicate that habitual exercise is capable of regulating the immune system and delaying the onset of immunosenescence.”2 Consider exercise an excellent bet for keeping your immune system biologically young.

Exercise helps protect your cells by warding off inflammation and immunosenescence.

And it’s not just that exercise is helpful; we also know that sedentariness itself is terrible for metabolic health. Now several studies have found that sedentary people have shorter telomeres than people who are even a little more active.4

Their results hint that exercise really may increase telomerase’s replenishing action—and they help us understand which kinds of exercise are best for keeping our cells healthy.

Moderate aerobic endurance exercise, performed three times a week for forty-five minutes at a time, for six months, increased telomerase activity twofold.

high-intensity interval training (HIIT), in which short bursts of heart-pounding activity are alterna...

“resistance exercise should be complementary to endurance training rather than a substitute”).

They also found that regardless of exercise type, those who increased their aerobic fitness the most had greater increases in telomerase activity. This tells us it’s the underlying cardiovascular fitness that matters most.

So try to do moderate cardiovascular exercise or HIT.

from walking to biking to strength training—that people engaged in, the longer their telomeres.

it helps maintain or improve bone density, muscle mass, balance, and coordination—all of which are vital for aging well.

Maybe the wonderful cellular effects of exercise, including less inflammation and oxidative stress, are good for telomeres. Or maybe exercise is good for telomeres

because it prevents stress from causing some of i...

but exercise switches on autophagy, the housekeeping activity in the cell that eats up those damaged...

To keep your telomeres healthy, you need to work them out. For the workouts that have been shown to improve telomere maintenance, see the Renewal Lab.

Exercise also increases the number and quality of those energy-producing mitochondria. In this way, exercise can reduce the amount of oxidative stress.

After exercise, when your body is recovering, it is still cleaning up cell debris, making cells healthier and more robust than before exercise.

It is very possible for someone to perform light regular exercise, but not be fit.