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Have a whole-foods dinner (see our website for ideas).
But neighborhoods that feel safe and look beautiful—with leafy trees and green parks—are related to longer telomeres, no matter what the income and education level of their residents.
Children who live in a neighborhood that is physically disorderly, with vacant buildings and trash in the streets, have shorter telomeres. The presence of litter or broken glass right outside the house is an especially strong predictor of telomere trouble.
Exposure to green spaces is associated with lower stress and healthier regulation of daily cortisol secretions.
One study of around two hundred African American children in New Orleans, Louisiana, found that poverty was associated with shorter telomeres.12 Once you have basic needs met, having more money doesn’t seem to help further—there are no consistent relationships between gradients of how much money you make and your telomere length.
the more education, the longer the telomeres.
seven pesticides have been linked to significantly shorter telomeres in agricultural workers who apply them to crops:
In one study, the greater the cumulative exposure to the pesticides, the shorter the telomeres.
Pesticides cause oxidative stress—and oxidative stress, when it accumulates, shortens telomeres.
Cigarette smoking has been linked to shorter telomeres—no
Smokers have twice the levels of cadmium in their blood compared to nonsmokers.
In a large study of U.S. adults, those with the worst cadmium exposure have up to eleven additional years of cellular aging.
Lead is another heavy metal to watch out for. Lead is found in some factories, some older homes, and developing nations that do not yet regulate lead paint and still use leaded gasoline, and it is another potential culprit in telomere shortening.
Many cities still use lead pipes, and the lead can travel into our homes and drinking water.
hydrocarbons (PAHs), is airborne, which makes it especially hard to avoid. PAHs are by-products of combustion and can be breathed in from fumes from cigarette and tobacco smoke, coal and coal tar, gas stoves, wildfires, hazardous waste, asphalt, and traffic pollution. You can also be exposed to PAHs if you eat foods grown in affected soil or that have been cooked on a grill. Beware. Higher exposure to PAHs has been shown to be associated with shorter telomere length in several studies.
very long telomeres in some cases are associated with uncontrolled cell growth—in other words, cancer. So when genotoxic chemicals get into our bodies, we are more likely to get mutations and cancerous cells, and if the telomeres of those cells are long, they are more likely to divide and divide and divide into cancerous tumors.
natural products—but only when it was convenient for me to buy them. After realizing that so many of our household cleaners and cosmetics contained genotoxic and telomere-damaging chemicals, I now actively seek out natural products.
Arsenic is naturally found in wells and groundwater, so you can either have your water tested or use a filter. Avoid plastic drinking bottles and cookware. Even BPA (Bisphenol A)–free plastic bottles may not be free of other harmful chemicals.
Try not to microwave plastics, even the ones that say they are microwavable.
Greenery—trees, green space, and even house plants—can help reduce the levels of air pollutants inside your home
In animal research, even rats, who are social animals, suffer when they are caged solo. Little did we know how stressful isolation is for this social animal. Now we know that when rats are caged alone, they don’t receive the safety signals from being in close proximity to others and feel more stressed out. They get three times more mammary tumors than the rats who live in a group.
Do you have someone in your life who is close to you but also causes unease? About half of all relationships have positive qualities with less helpful interactions, what researcher Bert Uchino calls “mixed relationships.” Unfortunately, having more of these mixed-quality relationships is related to shorter telomeres.
These mixed relationships are characterized by friends who don’t always know how to offer support. It’s stressful when a friend misunderstands your problems or doesn’t give you the kind of support you really want.
married people, or people living with a partner, have longer telomeres.
African Americans tend to develop more chronic diseases of aging. For example, they have higher rates of stroke than other racial and ethnic populations in the United States. Poor health behaviors, poverty, and lack of access to good medical care may explain some of these statistics, but so does a lifetime of greater stress exposure.
Eat less animal and dairy fat. The fatty parts of meat are where certain bioaccumulative compounds collect and concentrate. The same goes for the fat in large, long-lived fish, except that there is a balancing issue to weigh. Fatty fish such as salmon and tuna also contain omega-3s, which are good for your telomeres, so eat in moderation.
try not to eat the charred portions,
Eat foods that are free of pesticides when possible; at the very least, wash your produce thoroughly before consuming. Purchase organic fruits, vegetables, and meats, or grow your own.
Use housecleaning products containing natural ingredients. You can make many of these products yourself. We like the housecleaning “recipes” found at http://chemical-free-living.com/chemical-free-cleaning.html.
Find safe personal-care products. Carefully read the labels on personal-care products such as soap, shampoo, and makeup. You can also visit http://www.ewg.org/skindeep to identify which chemicals are in your beauty products. When in doubt, buy products that are organic or all natural.
Go greener. Buy more house plants: two per one hundred square feet is ideal for keeping your air filtered. Good choices include philodendrons, Boston ferns, peace lilies, and English ivy.
If you live in a city, consider lobbying your municipal government to install air-purifying billboards. These billboards do the work of 1,200 trees, cleaning a space of
up to 100,000 cubic meters by removing pollutants such as dust particles and metals from the air.
Stay up to date about toxic products by downloading the “Detox Me” app by Silent Spring: http://www.silentspring.org/.
Show gratitude and appreciation. Say, “Thanks for doing the dishes” or “Thanks for supporting me at the meeting.” Be present. This means not looking at a screen or around the room. Give your full, sincere attention. That is a gift you can give another person, and it doesn’t cost a dime. Hug or touch your loved ones more often. Touch releases oxytocin.
Some of us arrive in this world with shorter telomeres. Some of us are lucky to have longer ones.
As you can imagine, telomere length at birth is influenced by genetics, but that is not the whole story.
The nutrients that a pregnant mother consumes, and the level of stress she experiences, can influence her baby’s telomere length.
Babies whose mothers never completed high school have shorter telomeres in their cord blood compared to those whose moms had a high school diploma—meaning that they have shorter telomeres from the first day of their lives.
How could a parent’s education level affect the telomeres of her developing baby? The answer is that telomeres are transgenerational. Parents can, of course, hand down genes that affect telomere length. But the really profound message is that parents have a second way of transmitting telomere length, known as direct transmission. Because of direct transmission, both parents’ telomeres—at whatever length they are at the time of conception in the egg and sperm—are passed to the developing baby (a form of epigenetics).
Telomere syndromes are inherited, caused when parents pass a single mutated
telomere-related gene down to their children.
If the mother’s telomeres are short throughout her body (including those in the egg) when she contributes the egg, the baby’s telomeres will be short, too. They’ll be short from the moment the baby starts developing.
a mother who has been able to keep her telomeres robust will pass her stable, healthy telomeres to the growing child.
Upon fertilization of the egg, the chromosomes that come in from the dad via the sperm join the chromosomes from the mother. The sperm, like the egg, also bears its own telomeres that are directly transmitted to the developing baby.
In a new study of 490 newborns and parents, babies’ cord blood telomeres were more related to their moms’ telomere length than their dads’, but they are both clearly influential.
Did your parents suffer from prolonged, extreme stress before you were born?
If your parents’ telomeres were shortened by chronic stress, poverty, unsafe neighborhoods, chemical exposures, or other factors, they may have passed their shortened telomeres to you through direct transmission in the womb. There is even the possibility that you, in turn, could pass those shortened telomeres to your own children.
From the first moments of life, telomeres may be a measure of social and health inequalities. They may help explain the disparity among different postal codes in the United States. People living in certain ZIP codes that represent wealthier areas have life
expectancies up to ten years longer than people in other ZIP codes that cover poorer areas.
