Anti-Aging Telomeres Can Save Us From ‘a One-Way Slippery Slope Toward Decay,’ Experts Say

What if you found out that the fountain of youth is right inside your own body, and that you could freshen it and sip from it whenever you choose? Well, consider yourself schooled in the power of telomeres — repeating segments of DNA that live at the ends of our chromosomes, protecting our DNA like the caps at the end of shoelaces. They shorten over time, paving the way for illness and chronic disease and other not-so-great effects of aging. Remarkably, though, those telomeres can also lengthen, based largely on what we communicate to them via our lifestyle behaviors, thus making for a dynamic aging process that can be accelerated or slowed.

“Aging need not be, as thought for so long, a one-way slippery slope toward infirmity and decay,” explain researchers Elizabeth Blackburn and Elissa Epel in their groundbreaking new book, The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer, released on Jan. 3 and already set to hit the New York Times bestseller list on Jan. 22. “We all will get older, but how we age is very much dependent on our cellular health.”

Blackburn is a noted Australian-American molecular biologist who was among a trio awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of telomeres’ influence on the aging process. To elaborate on that for this book, she’s teamed up with health psychologist Epel, and both combed through stacks of science-journal studies on telomere findings to gather all the latest evidence.

“The science has reached a critical period where we had enough studies that we felt compelled to share with people so they could use this information,” Epel says, speaking with Yahoo Beauty, along with Blackburn, about the hopeful news that they and other scientists have unearthed.

Chief among the lessons of how you can slow your own aging process: “It’s never too late, and you can do these things, so you can feel empowered,” Blackburn explains. “And it doesn’t have to be huge changes in every aspect of life. Each different kind of change you make just nudges you in a better direction, and we know that translates into better health outcomes, so it’s a very encouraging message.”

So what exactly can be done to lengthen those youth-giving telomeres? Blackburn and Epel divide their tips into several categories, including all the usual suspects, but with welcome twists:

Exercise and nutrition

Before you groan about how you’ve already overcommitted yourself to enough New Year’s resolutions, heed Blackburn’s encouraging advice: “You don’t need to get mixed in with a gym membership — you can walk, which can push you into a better physiological and mental state,” she says. According to one particularly pointed study discussed in the book, the best types of exercise for telomere health are moderate aerobic endurance workouts — such as walking or running at about 60 percent of your ability — and high-intensity interval training, either of which can be complemented with (but not replaced by) resistance workouts. The cardio workouts, the study found, when done three times a week for 45 minutes each time over a six-week period, increased telomere growth “twofold.”

Exercise also helps reduce stress, which is good for telomere health. “If you’re stressed out in a long-term, severe way, the benefit of exercise is about twice as good as the benefit for nonstressed people,” Blackburn notes. “So just when you don’t feel like exercising, it’s very good to know. It’s very motivating.” Regarding nutrition, studies advise swapping too much red meat, white bread, and sweetened drinks with a more Mediterranean diet, plus sources of omega-3s.

Stress management

Sure, we all have stress — but it’s what we do with it that can affect the health of our telomeres. “In as quick as a year we see a bit of telomere shortening if people have a really hard year with a lot of stuff going on for them, but we don’t see that shortening in people who are doing daily behaviors with a healthy lifestyle,” Epel points out. “So if they’re sleeping enough and eating a protective diet that’s high in antioxidants and fruits and vegetables, and they’re active, they’re protecting themselves from [telomere] shortening that’s specifically due to stress. Stress seems to accelerate it, but we can buffer that, and protect ourselves from their impact on our body.”

Ways to mentally trick yourself out of anxiety-provoking moments can also serve as telomere protectors, such as using “distancing” techniques to create space between your feeling and thinking selves. “One approach is visual distancing,” Epel explains, “where you replay [the source of stress] as if it’s a movie, kind of letting yourself observe the situation more objectively … so you’re not just reacting, but you’re observing it.” In “time distancing,” meanwhile, she adds, “just asking yourself, ‘Is this situation going to affect me in five years?’ can help us realize that, in the big picture, it’s not such a big deal, and that we’re going to get through it.” These and other techniques, she says, provide “a mental and physical break, and can help us be more stress-resilient, so when we need to cope with stressful situations we have more reserve in our body.”

Make peace with your past

Sometimes telomere shortening happens because of situations you had no control over, left over from childhood. While some childhood adversity — in a setting where you felt supported and loved — can serve in making you resilient, according to The Telomere Effect, more extreme situations can have lasting negative health effects, which was a finding Blackburn says she found remarkable. “You can look at adults and you see how, wow, that is reflected in how short their telomeres are. So that can’t go away. It does increase the likelihood, statistically, of having shorter telomeres into later life, which was very startling to us.” But once again, she emphasizes, “The nice thing about telomeres is that they are changeable, and it’s not like you’re stuck forever with it — they are malleable.”

Go natural

Blackburn, who was president of the American Association for Cancer Research, advises staying away from artificial telomere “lengtheners,” which have entered the market. “What’s very important is when we try to nudge our telomeres into being longer that we do it in natural ways,” Blackburn notes, “and that’s because telomere maintenance, if carried to an extreme, can actually push cells into becoming more likely, over the years, to generate certain kinds of cancers. There are artificial substitutes that have been advertised and we just don’t know what they do, because if you haven’t studied them for four years you wouldn’t know.”

Bottom line in all this? “You’re very empowered, you don’t have to be relying on other people or products,” Blackburn says. “And know that what you do really will be helpful in upping your chances of staying healthy longer.”

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