The Telomere Effect

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.

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.

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…