1-Sentence-Summary: The Telomere Effect shows you how to live healthier and stay younger longer by identifying an important part of your physiology that you might have never heard of and teaching you how to take great care of it.
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According to the Bible, Methusaleh’s 969-year life was the longest in recorded history. Many others around his time also lived for centuries. But as the years wore on, human being’s lifespans became shorter and shorter.
All throughout history mankind has been curious about living longer. These days, we don’t live nearly as long as our ancestors may have, but we’re nevertheless obsessed with improving our life expectancy.
While the Fountain of Youth is only folklore, we do still wonder what we can do to live healthier and longer lives. And although living much beyond a hundred is nearly impossible, recent scientific findings do give us insight into the truth about longevity.
In 2009 Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn earned a shared Nobel Prize with two of her colleagues for the discovery of the nature of a new cell component that completely changes our understanding of the aging process.
You’ll get to learn all about it and how you can use it to your advantage in her book The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer.
Here are 3 of the most exciting lessons I discovered about physiology:
- How fast you age, and how old you look, depends on your telomeres.
- Think positively, it affects how healthy your cells are.
- For healthy telomeres, get into the habits of exercising and getting enough rest.
Are you ready to discover the fountain of youth? Let’s dive right in and see what we can learn!
Lesson 1: Your telomeres affect how old you look and how fast you age.
How many people do you know that are afraid to get old? It’s not an uncommon fear, and for good reason-aging is not fun. As they say, getting old ain’t for sissies!
To keep our bodies healthy, our cells have to regenerate frequently. Certain cells, however, have a limit to the number of times they can reproduce. Healthy structures in the body suffer when these get damaged because of the inflammatory signals they send throughout your system. This makes the operations of the entire body suffer.
Think of your body like a case of strawberries. If just one gets moldy, it begins affecting all the other good ones around it.
Telomeres, which the author and her colleagues uncovered the nature of in 2009, can help reverse these negative effects. Each of the chromosomes in your cells has a telomere at the end of it which helps protect the cell.
But each time a cell divides, it’s telomeres get shorter.
You might not think much of this tiny component of your body, but the health of your telomeres determine how old you look and feel right down to the hairs on your head. When you go out in the sun too long, for example, the UV exposure damages them.
In other words, if you tan too much, you could end up getting gray hairs earlier!
And although these powerful cell structures help fight aging, they don’t last forever. But there are some things you can do to keep them, and yourself, healthier for longer.
Lesson 2: Negative thinking damages your telomeres.
It’s not easy to avoid reacting poorly when something goes wrong in your life. After all, we’re only human, right? Be careful how much you do, though, because it’s not good for your telomeres and can make you age faster.
Cynical hostility, or the tendency toward cynicism that some people have, is just one example. It usually leads to overeating and other bad habits like smoking, which cause disease.
One study found shorter telomeres in British civil servants that had more cynical hostility. It also identified a raised level of telomerase, which helps build new telomeres, in their systems. So it was still there but wasn’t doing its job right.
Pessimism is bad for aging too because of how it affects the threat level you feel when under stress. This means that if you develop heart disease in old age, for instance, it will progress more quickly.
Stress also causes shorter telomeres. If you’re constantly unhappy with whatever you’re currently doing, you’re constantly increasing your stress levels ad accelerating the rate at which you age.
Mental illnesses also affect the health of your cells. The way they impact the mitochondria triggers inflammation, which makes sickness progress faster.
Anxiety and depression come from major life events. More recent occurrences have a bigger impact on your telomeres. Anything five years ago or more, however, isn’t as big of a threat.
Lesson 3: Make sure you exercise and get enough rest if you want to have healthy telomeres.
We’d all like to lose a little weight. But setting this kind of goal isn’t only a matter of looks. The health of your telomeres and your youth is at stake too.
When you exercise, your telomeres become healthier, but not if you do too much physical activity. If you do it right, you’ll decrease your chances of high blood pressure, strokes, and dementia.
According to research from the Saarland University Medical Center in Germany, telomerase activity increased with a couple of kinds of exercise. One was high-intensity interval training, and the other was modest aerobic exercise.
Make sure that you get enough rest and recovery so that you don’t overdo it though. This can cause overtraining syndrome which interrupts sleep and makes you more at risk for illness and moodiness.
Sleep in general is another important factor for telomere health. When you sleep, your brain goes into restoration processes that also repair your DNA. Every time you interrupt this with poor sleep habits, your cells struggle to be productive and become more susceptible to stress.
Getting enough sleep is also crucial to make sure your appetite stays under control. When you fail to rest enough, insulin and cortisol spike which can put you into a prediabetic state.
So the longer you sleep, the longer your telomeres will be. Getting at least seven hours a night is optimal for preserving your youth and increasing your chances of living a longer life.
The Telomere Effect Review
Wow, physiology is so cool! The Telomere Effect taught me a ton of concepts about my own body that I never even though of before. It’s a fascinating read that I’m certain you will enjoy.
Who would I recommend The Telomere Effect summary to?
The 26-year-old that doesn’t want to get gray hairs like her mother did at a young age, the 53-year-old that wants to learn a few ways to increase their lifespan, and anyone that wants to be healthier.
Last Updated on September 19, 2022
