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Telomeres and Anti-Aging Strategies
Here are four simple anti-aging strategies to address the shortening of your telomeres and maybe even increase lifespan.
People always talk about how different factors affect lifespan. Some blame a shorter than average life almost entirely on bad genes. Others credit lifestyle factors like stress, bad nutrition, or lack of exercise.Regardless of which “macro” factors you credit for premature aging and shortened lifespan, they’re likely related to the same micro factor, and that micro factor has to do with telomere shortening. Luckily, there are a few things you can do about it.
Telomeres are tiny strands of species-specific DNA sequences located at the distal ends of chromosomes, but unlike most DNA sequences, they don’t code for any proteins. Instead, they prevent chromosomes from “unraveling” so they don’t fuse with other chromosomes and cause mutations or accelerate aging.
Telomere pioneer Elizabeth Blackburn compares them to aglets, the plastic thingies on the ends of shoelaces that keep them from fraying.
We’re born with a finite number of these biological aglets. On average, each cell is gifted with about 15,000 base pairs (the pairs of nucleotides connecting complementary strands of DNA or RNA). Each time a cell divides, we lose from as little as 10 to as many as a thousand of them. This phenomenon is called the “end-replication problem.”
Cells are limited to a fixed number of divisions. Use up all the telomeres in a cell – wear the chromosomes down to the nub – and the cell commits apoptosis: cellular suicide. If too many cells commit apoptosis, you get old and sick. Then you die.
All those “macro” causes of aging could, in one way or another, lead to premature telomere shortening or, equally bad, the inability of your cells to restore telomere length and/or integrity. Take heart, though. We know plenty about the care and feeding of telomeres so that you can increase your chances of living a long, healthy life.
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The main predator of telomeres – the things that tie macro and micro causes of premature aging together – are inflammation and reactive oxygen species (ROS), more commonly known as free radicals. They not only damage the constituent DNA of telomeres but the DNA building blocks that might lengthen them.
Inflammation itself can further increase ROS-mediated DNA damage and thus increase the formation of cell “senility.” It’s a vicious circle in which these “senile” cells further aggravate inflammation and speed up aging.
Telomeres are an exhaustible resource, but there’s something that can rejuvenate them by growing more base pairs. It’s called telomerase, and it’s a ribonucleoprotein that adds telemetric “repeats” to the ends of chromosomes.
Telomerase activity peters out after birth. There are, however, a couple of exceptions to this cruel rule. One is stem cells. The other is cancer cells, in which approximately 90% of them exhibit an up-regulation of telomerase, while the other 10% use some other method of extending the warranty on telomeres.
That explains why cancer is so pesky – if cancer cells can keep their number of telomeres stable, they no longer have an expiration date. They can continue to divide practically forever. If we could mimic cancer’s action on telomeres, only without all the tumors and death and stuff, we could theoretically live a lot longer.
There are two obstacles to preventing premature aging and a truncated lifespan. One is increased damage of DNA and, consequently, accelerated telomere attrition. The second is low or non-existent telomerase levels. Both can be addressed by lifestyle changes and proper diet and nutrition.
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Let’s be clear: We’re not going to arrest telomere attrition and give humans the lifespan of a Galapagos tortoise, but we can definitely slow the rate at which telomeres are whittled away.
If you smoke, don’t do that. If you drink more than a TV detective, stop that. Exercise. Breathe clean air and cut down on stress. But you knew all that. It’s the diet stuff you might not know that might make all the difference.
From 1999 to 2002, scientists collected 5,674 DNA samples from a broad spectrum of U.S. men and women, age-wise, race-wise, and even income-wise. All were required to provide complete data on such factors as body mass index, energy intake, physical activity, alcohol and tobacco use, and fiber intake.
While the DNA samples were collected between 1999 and 2002, it wasn’t until 2014 that the researchers released any of their telomere data. When they did, it turned out that fiber intake was linearly related to the telomere length of leukocytes (white blood cells) – adults that had higher fiber intake had longer telomeres than their counterparts, suggesting less biologic aging.
The scientists found that for each 1-gram of fiber intake per 1,000 calories of food eaten, telomeres were 83 base pairs longer. On average, every year of chronological age shortens telomeres by 15.5 base pairs, but the inclusion of 10 grams of fiber for every 1,000 kcal you eat would correspond with telomeres that were 83 base pairs longer. On average, this equated to over 5 fewer years of biological aging.
That’s a big pay-off for just adding some extra Metamucil or oatmeal to your diet.
Certain minerals have profound effects on telomere length. Tragically, Americans are generally deficient in a couple of them.
For instance, according to the NHANES (National Health and Nutrition Examination Study), every 20 mcg. increase of selenium in the diet was associated with a 0.42% increase in leukocyte telomeres.
Likewise, Nemoto et al. found that adding additional zinc to a cell culture medium increased telomerase activity. Later on, Bao et al. corroborated Nemoto’s work and found that zinc sulfate did indeed significantly increase telomere length and telomerase activity, along with reducing hTERT expression (an enzyme that rate limits telomerase activity).
The third mineral is magnesium. Rather than directly lengthening telomeres, magnesium’s role is more of a nurturing one, as it appears to help maintain telomeres and help regulate the activity of telomerase.
Unfortunately, about 80% of the American population is deficient in magnesium, and between 12 and 40% is deficient in zinc. When you add working out and sweating to the equation, it worsens as these minerals tend to leave the body via sweat.
Selenium deficiencies are relatively rare, but taking extra amounts may also help regulate testosterone levels and improve exercise tolerance, in addition to adding length to telomeres.
Getting these minerals helps ensure telomere viability, along with providing optimal protein synthesis, hormone production, energy production, and carbohydrate utilization.
Inflammation is one of the main predators of telomeres. Put the kibosh on inflammation and you’re well on your way to raising a happy crop of base pairs.
Chief among the things that extinguish inflammation are omega-3 fatty acids, commonly associated with fish oils. The reference libraries are filled with studies confirming fish oil’s anti-inflammatory effects, but one study, in particular, examined how it affected telomere length.
Kiecolt-Glaser, et al. found that taking either a 2.5 gram or 1.25 gram dose of fish oil was enough to lower the omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acid ratio in test subjects, which led to reduced levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6), an inflammatory cytokine. This lower omega-6 to omega-3 ratio was, in turn, clearly associated with lengthened telomeres.
It definitely works, but the challenging thing about fish oil is in finding one with the following attributes:
- High concentrations of DHA and EPA.
- A product that’s been purified by molecular distillation and stringently tested for PCBs, dioxins, mercury, and other heavy metal contaminants.
- A product that includes a self-emulsifying delivery system so they’re virtually odorless, better absorbed, and don’t result in a fishy aftertaste or “fish burps.”
Pollution, smoking, stress, alcohol, lack of exercise, and too much exercise cause the formation of free radicals, and free radicals accelerate telomere shortening. Numerous experiments show that an excess of free radicals can be offset with antioxidants. The best antioxidants are largely polyphenols – plant chemicals that seemingly have inexhaustible beneficial effects.
Well-known polyphenols include curcumin and resveratrol, both of which have been tested independently and found to have antioxidant (and anti-inflammatory) properties.
Each powdered serving, mixed into water, juice, protein drinks, or just about anything else you might eat, has an ORAC rating of approximately 15,000.
The ORAC scale is how the USDA measures the Total Antioxidant Potency of foods and nutritional supplements. The term stands for “Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity,” and the measurement is expressed as ORAC units per 100 grams of a given compound.
For instance, the USDA determined an “average serving of fruits and vegetables” has an ORAC rating of between 400 and 500. That means that just one teaspoon of Superfood has the antioxidant equivalency of around 20 average servings of fruits and vegetables.
The free radicals that affect telomeres and telomerase don’t have a chance.
The additive effects aren’t unlimited, of course. You can’t live forever by just eating more and more of the telomere-friendly foods or supplements. You top out.
However, if you were to take/do all four things, in conjunction with living what most people define as a healthy life, I guesstimate that it would equate to around 8 to 10 fewer years of biological aging.
Whether you’d actually live that much longer is anyone’s guess, but you’d most likely postpone many of the ailments of aging, and that ain’t bad.