Everything You Need to Know About Telomere and Longevity
What Is a Telomere?
Telomeres are structural components of DNA. You can find telomeres at the end of each DNA strand.
Think of telomeres as protective protein caps for DNA that help maintain genomic stability. Without telomeres, DNA strands get damaged and may impair cellular function.
Why Are Telomeres Important?
Every cell of your body contains DNA. DNA contains all of the instructions our body needs for optimal functioning.
As a protective protein cap, telomeres help keep the information in DNA safe. So these structures help maintain optimal functioning at a cellular level. Unfortunately, with each cell division, telomeres become shorter.
At a certain point, telomeres will hit the Hayflick limit.
What is the Hayflick limit? This refers to the maximum number of times a cell will divide. After hitting this limit, cells stop dividing because telomeres hit a critically short length.
That’s why many scientists use telomere length as a biomarker for longevity and overall healthspan. Apart from aging in general, studies show that telomere length is linked to various chronic illnesses such as:
Certain cancers
Neurological diseases
Cardiovascular diseases
Osteoporosis
Type 2 diabetes
Given its association with age and illness, scientists believe that Telomere length is a good representation of biological age. As opposed to your chronological age, biological age refers to how well your body is functioning.
There’s nothing you can do about chronological aging. But there may be things you can do to slow down or even reverse biological aging—you just need to know what factors contribute to aging.
What Contributes to Telomere Shortening?
As you age, telomeres naturally shorten. But there may be things that speed it up.
So, if you can, steer clear from these factors to protect your telomeres.
Are There Other Telomere Interventions?
In 2009, Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak discovered how a specific enzyme could help synthesize telomeres. This groundbreaking discovery won them the Nobel Prize for Medicine.
The study shows that their supplement lengthened telomeres in a statistically and clinically significant way. More studies are being done to see how telomerase therapies can target aging and cancer.
What’s Next?
Scientists have come a long way since telomeres were initially discovered in the 1930s. It was only a few decades back when researchers found a link between telomere length and cellular aging. Since then, more than 20,000 journal articles have been written about telomeres.
But there’s still a lot of work ahead of them. They need to run more studies and clinical trials to learn more about the aging process, telomeres, and telomerase therapies.
As we wait to learn more about telomere therapies, there are other epigenetic applications you can take advantage of. If you’re serious about healthspan extension, then it’s important to know your true age or your biological age.
Knowing your biological age will give you an accurate view of your health status. A biological age test measures another biomarker of aging called DNA methylation.
Using a small blood sample, the test measures the pattern of DNA methylation changes to predict the quality of your health and the risk of various diseases. If you’re interested in learning more about the benefits of a biological age test, visit the TruDiagnostic website.
What concerns you most about aging? Please share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.
Most members of the band subscribed to a live-fast-die-young lifestyle. But as they partook in the drinking and drugging endemic to the 1990s grunge scene after shows at the Whiskey a Go Go, Roxy and other West Coast clubs, the band’s guitarist, Valter Longo, a nutrition-obsessed Italian Ph.D. student, wrestled with a lifelong addiction to longevity.
Now, decades after Dr. Longo dropped his grunge-era band, DOT, for a career in biochemistry, the Italian professor stands with his floppy rocker hair and lab coat at the nexus of Italy’s eating and aging obsessions.
“For studying aging, Italy is just incredible,” said Dr. Longo, a youthful 56, at the lab he runs at a cancer institute in Milan, where he will speak at an aging conference later this month. Italy has one of the world’s oldest populations, including multiple pockets of centenarians who tantalize researchers searching for the fountain of youth. “It’s nirvana.”
Dr. Longo, who is also a professor of gerontology and director of the U.S.C. Longevity Institute in California, has long advocated longer and better living through eating Lite Italian, one of a global explosion of Road to Perpetual Wellville theories about how to stay young in a field that is itself still in its adolescence.
In addition to identifying genes that regulate aging, he has created a plant and nut-based diet with supplements and kale crackers that mimics fasting to, he argues, allow cells to shed harmful baggage and rejuvenate, without the down side of actually starving. He has patented and sold his ProLon diet kits; published best-selling books (“The Longevity Diet”); and been called an influential “Fasting Evangelist” by Time magazine.
Last month, he published a new study based on clinical trials of hundreds of older people — including in the Calabria town from which his family hails — that he said suggests that periodic cycles of his own faux-fasting approach could reduce biological age and stave off illnesses associated with aging.
His private foundation, also based in Milan, tailors diets for cancer patients, but also consults for Italian companies and schools, promoting a Mediterranean diet that is actually foreign to most Italians today.
“Almost nobody in Italy eats the Mediterranean diet,” said Dr. Longo, who has a breezy California manner and Italian accent. He added that many Italian children, especially in the country’s south, are obese, bloated on what he calls the poisonous five Ps — pizza, pasta, protein, potatoes and pane (or bread).
At the foundation recently, the resident nutritionist, Dr. Romina Cervigni, sat amid pictures on the wall showing Dr. Longo playing guitar with centenarians, and shelves of his longevity diet books, translated into many languages and filled with recipes.
“It’s very similar to the original Mediterranean diet, not the present one,” she said, pointing at photographs on the wall of a bowl of ancient legumes similar to the chickpea, and of a Calabrian green bean pod prized by Dr. Longo. “His favorite.”
Dr. Longo, who has split his time between California and Italy for the past decade, once occupied a niche field. But in recent years, Silicon Valley billionaires who hope to be forever young have funded secretive labs. Wellness articles have conquered newspaper home pages and Fountains-of-Youth workout and diet ads featuring insanely fit middle-aged people teem on the social media feeds of not insanely fit middle-aged people.
But even as concepts like longevity, intermittent fasting and biological age — you’re only as old as your cells feel! — have gained momentum, governments like Italy’s are fretting over a creakier future in which booming populations of old people drain resources from the dwindling young.
And yet many scientists, nutritionists and longevity fanatics the world over continue to stare longingly toward Italy, seeking in its deep pockets of centenarians a secret ingredient to long life.
“Probably they kept breeding between cousins and relatives,” Dr. Longo offered, referring to the sometimes close relations in little Italian hill towns. “At some point, we suspect it sort of generated the super-longevity genome.”
The genetic drawbacks of incest, he hypothesized, slowly vanished because those mutations either killed their carriers before they could reproduce or because the town noticed a monstrous ailment — like early onset Alzheimer’s — in a particular family line and steered clear. “You’re in a little town, you’re probably going to get tagged.”
Dr. Longo wonders whether Italy’s centenarians had been protected from later disease by a starvation period and old-fashioned Mediterranean diet early in life, during rural Italy’s abject war-era poverty. Then a boost of proteins and fats and modern medicine after Italy’s postwar economic miracle protected them from frailty as they got older and kept them alive.
It could, he said, be a “historical coincidence that you’ll never see again.”
The mysteries of aging seized Dr. Longo at a young age.
He grew up in the northeastern port of Genoa but visited his grandparents back in Molochio, Calabria, a town known for its centenarians, every summer. When he was 5, he stood in a room as his grandfather, in his 70s, died.
“Probably something very much preventable,” Dr. Longo said.
At age 16, he moved to Chicago to live with relatives and couldn’t help notice that his middle-aged aunts and uncles fed on the “Chicago diet” of sausages and sugary drinks suffered diabetes and cardiovascular disease that their relatives back in Calabria did not.
“This was like the ’80s,” he said, “just like the nightmare diet.”
While in Chicago, he often went downtown to plug in his guitar at any blues club that would let him play. He enrolled in the renowned jazz guitar program at the University of North Texas.
“Even worse,” he said. “Tex-Mex.”
He ultimately ran afoul of the music program when he refused to direct the marching band, so he shifted his focus to his other passion.
“Aging,” he said, “it was in my head.”
He eventually earned his Ph.D in biochemistry at U.C.L.A. and did his postdoctoral training in the neurobiology of aging at U.S.C. He overcame early skepticism about the field to publish in top journals and became a zealous evangelizer for the age-reversing effects of his diet. About 10 years ago, eager to be closer to his aging parents in Genoa, he took a second job at the IFOM oncology institute in Milan.
He found a fount of inspiration in the pescatarian-heavy diet around Genoa and all the legumes down in Calabria.
“Genes and nutrition,” he said of Italy as an aging lab, “it’s just unbelievable.”
But he also found the modern Italian diet — the cured meats, layers of lasagna and fried vegetables the world hungered for — horrendous and a source of disease. And like other Italian aging researchers who are seeking the cause for aging in inflammation or hoping to zap senescent cells with targeted drugs, he said Italy’s lack of investment in research was a disgrace.
“Italy’s got such incredible history and a wealth of information about aging,” he said. “But spends virtually nothing.”
Back at his lab — where colleagues prepared the fasting-mimicking diet “broth mix” for mice — he passed a photograph on a shelf depicting a broken wall and reading, “We’re slowly falling apart.” He talked about how he and others had identified an important regulator of aging in yeast, and how he has investigated whether the same pathway was at work in all organisms. He said his research benefited from his past life of musical improvisation, because it opened his mind to unexpected possibilities, including using his diet to starve cells afflicted with cancer and other diseases.
Dr. Longo said he thinks of his mission as extending youth and health, not simply putting more years on the clock, a goal he said could lead to a “scary world,” in which only the rich could afford to live for centuries, potentially forcing caps on having children.
A more likely short-term scenario, he said, was division between two populations. The first would live as we do now and reach about 80 or longer through medical advancements. But Italians would be saddled with long — and, given the drop in the birthrate, potentially lonely — years burdened by horrible diseases. The other population would follow fasting diets and scientific breakthroughs and live to 100 and perhaps 110 in relative good health.
A practitioner of what he preaches, Dr. Longo envisioned himself in the latter category.
“I want to live to 120, 130. It really makes you paranoid now because everybody’s like, ‘Yeah, of course you got at least to get to 100,’” he said. “You don’t realize how hard it is to get to 100.”
@andrewgregoryWed 28 Feb 2024 18.30 ESTLast modified on Wed 28 Feb 2024 21.31 EST
Ultra-processed food (UPF) is directly linked to 32 harmful effects to health, including a higher risk of heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, adverse mental health and early death, according to the world’s largest review of its kind.
The findings from the first comprehensive umbrella review of evidence come amid rapidly rising global consumption of UPF such as cereals, protein bars, fizzy drinks, ready meals and fast food.
In the UK and US, more than half the average diet now consists of ultra-processed food. For some, especially people who are younger, poorer or from disadvantaged areas, a diet comprising as much as 80% UPF is typical.
The findings published in the BMJ suggest diets high in UPF may be harmful to many elements of health. The results of the review involving almost 10 million people underscored a need for measures to target and reduce exposure to UPF, the researchers said.
The review involved experts from a number of leading institutions, including Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the US, the University of Sydney and Sorbonne University in France.
Writing in the BMJ, they concluded: “Overall, direct associations were found between exposure to ultra-processed foods and 32 health parameters spanning mortality, cancer, and mental, respiratory, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and metabolic health outcomes.”
They added: “Greater exposure to ultra-processed food was associated with a higher risk of adverse health outcomes, especially cardiometabolic, common mental disorders and mortality outcomes.
“These findings provide a rationale to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of using population-based and public-health measures to target and reduce dietary exposure to ultra-processed foods for improved human health.”
Ultra-processed foods, including packaged baked goods and snacks, fizzy drinks, sugary cereals, and ready-to-eat or ready meals, undergo multiple industrial processes and often contain colours, emulsifiers, flavours and other additives. These products also tend to be high in added sugar, fat, and/or salt, but are low in vitamins and fibre.
Previous studies have linked UPF to poor health, but no comprehensive review had yet provided a broad assessment of the evidence in this area.
To bridge this gap, researchers carried out an umbrella review – a high-level evidence summary – of 45 distinct pooled meta-analyses from 14 review articles associating UPF with adverse health outcomes.
The review articles were all published in the past three years and involved 9.9 million people. None were funded by companies involved in the production of UPF.
Estimates of exposure to ultra-processed foods were obtained from a combination of food frequency questionnaires, 24-hour dietary recalls, and dietary history and were measured as higher versus lower consumption, additional servings per day, or a 10% increment.
The researchers graded the evidence as convincing, highly suggestive, suggestive, weak, or no evidence. They also assessed the quality of evidence as high, moderate, low, or very low.
Overall, the results show that higher exposure to UPF was consistently associated with an increased risk of 32 adverse health outcomes, The BMJ reported.
Convincing evidence showed that higher UPF intake was associated with about a 50% increased risk of cardiovascular disease-related death, a 48 to 53% higher risk of anxiety and common mental disorders, and a 12% greater risk of type 2 diabetes.
Highly suggestive evidence also indicated that higher PF intake was associated with a 21% greater risk of death from any cause, a 40 to 66% increased risk of heart disease related death, obesity, type 2 diabetes and sleep problems, and a 22% increased risk of depression.
There was also evidence for associations between UPF and asthma, gastrointestinal health, some cancers and cardiometabolic risk factors, such as high blood fats and low levels of ‘good’ cholesterol, although the researchers cautioned the evidence for these links remains limited.
The researchers acknowledged several limitations to the umbrella review, including that they couldn’t rule out the possibility that other unmeasured factors and variations in assessing UPF intake may have influenced their results.
Some experts not involved in the research also highlighted that much of the research included in the umbrella review was weak and also cautioned that the findings do not prove cause and effect.
However, Dr Chris van Tulleken, an associate professor at University College London and one of the world’s leading UPF experts, said the findings were “entirely consistent” with a now “enormous number of independent studies which clearly link a diet high in UPF to multiple damaging health outcomes including early death”.
“We have good understanding of the mechanisms by which these foods drive harm,” he added. “In part it is because of their poor nutritional profile – they are often high in saturated fat, salt and free sugar.
But the way they are processed is also important – they’re engineered and marketed in ways which drive excess consumption – for example they are typically soft and energy dense and aggressively marketed usually to disadvantaged communities.”
In a linked editorial, academics from Brazil said UPFs were “often chemically manipulated cheap ingredients” and “made palatable and attractive by using combinations of flavours, colours, emulsifiers, thickeners and other additives”.
They added: “It is now time for UN agencies, with member states, to develop and implement a framework convention on ultra-processed foods analogous to the framework on tobacco.”
Meanwhile, a separate study published in the Lancet Public Health suggested that more than 9,000 heart disease-related deaths could be prevented in England over the next two decades if all restaurants, fast food outlets, cafes, pubs and takeaways put calories on their menus.
The Blue Zone diet is based on populations in the world that live the longest. The study was pioneered by Dan Buettner, a National Geographic best-selling author. After many years of interviews with centenarians, he and his team discovered five zones of the world that exhibited the most longevity: Okinawa, Japan, Sardina, Italy, Ikaria, Greece, Loma Linda, California and Nicoya, Costa Rico. They called these areas “Blue Zones” and here is just one of their stories:
“Botanically speaking, tomatoes are a fruit; technically, they’re a berry and legally a vegetable. In 1893 a ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, the tomato became legally classified as a vegetable because it’s used as one. More recently, tomato ketchup was named a vegetable in the school lunch program.”
In the late 1700’s, a large percentage of Europeans were afraid of the lowly tomato. It was literally called a “a poison apple” because the higher classes of consumers at the time and place were thought to have died from eating them. An explanation? Wealthy Europeans use pewter plates high in lead content and the tomato got all the blame.
Early herbalist and religious references botanically named it also a mandrake (AKA as an aphrodisiac) and classified it as a poisonous nightshade called Solanaceae thought to contain toxins called tropane alkaloids. Other foods in this classification include the eggplant. Currently, some people consider them a problem especially if you have arthritis pain – cutting nightshades out of your diet may be worth a try; however, there is no reliable evidence to support this claim.
The best tomatoes are seasonal – many of you may remember waiting for them to be at their flavor peak in the late summers (dependent on what part of the country you lived in like the northeast and upper Midwest states.) There, the weather is ideal for tomato growth with hotter days and cooler nights. It is best to buy tomatoes from local farmers and getting vine-ripened whenever possible. They taste the best and their flavor is at peak time.
” The fruit’s origin began in the Americas and eaten by Aztecs as early as 700 AD where it was known as the “tomatl.” It wasn’t grown in Britain until the 1590’s. It was associated with hotter climates and for this reason in cooler climates was only used as ornamental instead of food.”
“The first known reference to tomato was in 1710 in the British North American colonies and places the tomato in the Carolinas where it began to be accepted even with its ominous background. Recipes appeared in American cookery manuscripts, but fears and rumors lingered. Around 1880, the tomato grew in popularity in Europe due to the invention of the pizza. Presently, the United States has become the world’s largest tomato producer.
Nutritional Information
Tomatoes have considerable vitamin C and some vitamin A.
Tomatoes are claimed to be an anticancer weapon. It contains lycopene, the plant pigment makes the fruit red. It is particularly associated as a prostate cancer fighter.
However, it is best consumed when heated with oil for this effect.
Tomatoes also have a compound called lutein that may help prevent macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness in older people.
Source:
The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, Smith, 2007
The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth, Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S
A new developing science states: The connection between the mind and gut is bidirectional; the gut talks to the brain and the brain talks to the gut. Major health problems can appear when this system is disturbed; One way to minimize this is to keep your microbial “self” happy and working properly. The connection can affect mood and overall health.
HOW TO FEED YOUR GUT MICROBES
Try to maintain a variety of diverse gut microbes by maximizing your consumption of naturally fermented food, probiotics and prebiotics(these foods “feed” your own intestinal microbes.)
For reduction of gut inflammation, try these:
Cut down on animal fat in your diet.
Avoid when possible, mass-produced ultra-processed foods.
Reduce stress and practice mindfulness of what you’re eating.
“Obesity is an extremely complex, multifactorial disease, with many of its most harmful effects arising from hormonal stimulation. Adipose tissue is an endocrine organ, and more than a hundred different hormones are produced by fat cells. As the cells expand with weight gain, production increases. Some of these hormones cause inflammation or trigger blood-clotting mechanisms, while others raise blood pressure or lead to insulin resistance, for example. Obesity affects virtually every body system and is associated with more than 200 medical conditions.”
The Japanese diet is one of the world’s lowest in fat. Other attributes include fish as a mainstay and soy foods. The Japanese also care about appearance and think of food as an art – resulting in more appetizing and satisfying foods. Do these characteristics contribute to the Japanese record of low rates of major chronic diseases and the fact that they boast the world’s highest life expectancy – age 76 for men and 82 for women?
In contrast, in 1980, 30 percent of U .S. adult population were affected by at least one chronic condition. Today it’s 60 percent. The percentage of those affected by two or more chronic diseases has grown from 16 percent to 42 percent. What and how do the Japanese eat? Often, it is Interesting to study lifestyles, in particular what and how other cultures eat to gain some insights as to what exactly is a healthy diet. No one expects the typical American to start munching on seaweed but the study indicates that what and how we eat can affect our overall health and longevity.
“The evidence that too much steak is bad for the heart continues to pile up. A new report finds consuming red meat and processed foods, like sausages and bacon, leads to patients with poorer heart function.”
This study was interesting since it examined some vital structures of the heart by various imaging methods.
Americans don’t live as long as people in most other high-income countries. We hear so much about how healthy habits are the recommendations of the medical community, but often they come across as vague and not specific enough. How many times has your doctor said, “watch your diet” as you leave his/her office. Here are the highlights of a study that actually investigated the adherence of these habits and how they related to longevity rates.
Researchers found that people who maintained five healthy lifestyle factors lived more than a decade longer than those who didn’t maintain any of the five.
A Study led by Frank Hu at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health analyzed data from more than 78,000 women and 44,000 men who participated in two nationwide surveys (Nurses Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-up Study.)
The study was funded by NIH National Heart Lung and Blood Institute and National Cancer Institute and published in Circulation on April 30, 2018.
Data identified five different low-risk lifestyle factors and compared health outcomes for those who adopted all five with those who didn’t adopt any.
The Factors:
1. Maintaining a healthy eating pattern (like the Mediterranean Diet) The DASH Diet or the MIND Diet are also healthy choices. You can find details on Amazon Books.
Limiting beverages with added sugar, trans fats, and sodium
2. Moderate drinking (2 glasses for men and 1 glass for women) daily.
3. Not smoking
4. Getting at least 3.5 hours of moderate to vigorous physical activity each week
5. Maintaining a normal weight (18.5 to 24.9) BMI
Each participant’s medical history: heart disease, cancer, diabetes, age at death (when applicable).
Results:
At age 50, women who did not adopt any of the five healthy habits were estimated to live on average until they were 79 years old and men until they were 75.5 years.
In contrast, women who adopted all five healthy habits lived to 91.1 years and men lived to 87.6 years.
From the medical histories, Independently, each healthy lifestyle factor significantly lowered the risk of total death, death from cancer, and death from heart disease.
Source:
Tianna Hicklin, PhD. Healthy habits can lengthen life. National Institutes of Health (NIH).
FOOD, FACTS and FADS 