Telomeres (following)

Now it should be clear what telomeres are. But in practical terms, how can we add years to our life? How are telomeres affected by our lifestyle choices? How can we keep them as longer as possible? If you have read carefully what I’ve written so far, you should know the answer: when cells divide and replicate, we lose telomere length. The real problem arises when we force our cells to do so: to repair damaged tissue and to cope with stresses of ANY kind. It’s as simple as that.

When telomeres are reduced to approximately five thousands base pairs, our cells become senescent and die. For this reason, the maximum life span until now has been 120 years. Are we engineered to that maximum number of years or can we life longer? In theory we could, wherefore smoking, drinking, sleep deprivation, chronic stress, illnesses, hormonal imbalance, sedentary behaviour, obesity, exposure to environmental toxins, injuries of any kind all increase the cellular replicative process, which in turn speeds up telomeres loss.

Just imagine your entire life totally without all those kind of stresses, which is impossible, but just do it: you’ll surely live more than 120 years, won’t you?

Therefore next time I’ll begin to post a list of twenty telomere-friendly foods: controlling free radicals, oxidation, glycation slows down telomere shortening. Maybe I’ll post them in 10 + 10, in order to give proper hints as to all of them. Eating well, getting adequate sleep, exercising regularly, meditating, taking the right supplements accomplishes these things. There is no one single silver bullet but a multitude of good behaviours combined all together.

Let’s be very clear on one point though: being fat is NOT healthy. Period. A “healthy”, just “partially fat”, is pure fantasy you use to justify your bad eating habits. Overloading on calories puts a tremendous strain on your digestive system, causing an increase in inflammation and oxidative stress, accelerating the rate of telomere shortening. Do you want to live longer? Be lean.

For the time being this is the best we can do. Actually there are telomerase activators available on the market but apparently just one is partially working and sold as a specific supplement. Besides it’s very, very expensive (I cannot advertise it here). Our only weapon is prevention in all the various ways I described, particularly in one of my previous posts where they’re all listed.

Remember the three poisons, all equally harmful: alcohol, sugar, tobacco.

….Always humble,

Angiolino