You Can Live Longer if You Fix the End of Your Shoelaces.
Imagine you’re hanging out with your friends. There’s laughter, jokes, and smiles all around. You come home to a stress-free family with cookies in the oven and a crackling fireplace. It feels like you could live forever, doesn’t it?
When you want to extend your lifespan, so many factors contribute. This could be whether you have healthy relationships, a stress free job, and how long your telomeres are.
Wait, what?
What’s a telomere?
A telomere is a cap at the end of our chromosomes, similar to the plastic at the end of a shoelace. When the plastic tip of a shoelace starts to wear down, the shoelaces become frayed and unusable. It’s the same with a telomere. When a telomere becomes worn and short, the DNA gets damaged and cells can’t do their job.
When a cell divides, each chromosome needs to make another copy of the same cell so that the duplicate has the same information. When this happens though, the end of a cell can’t be duplicated, thus making the end (aka telomere) shorter every time. When the length of a telomere becomes to short, the cell can die, go into apoptosis, or become senescent.
What affects telomeres?
Lifestyle plays an important factor in determining telomere length and telomerase activity. Factors such as obesity, stress, alcohol consumption, smoking, air pollution and low physical activity can significantly increase the rate of telomere shortening, cancer risk and affect longevity.
The most common theme for rapid shortening of the telomeres is stress. That’s right folks, go on a vacation and you could be ten times younger! 🥳
I’m kidding, but lightening the load of stress everyday would be a huge benefit in reducing the rate that your telomeres shorten. Cortisol, one of the main stress hormones, has been linked with shortened telomeres countless times. In this article, it says that “Women with the highest levels of perceived stress have telomeres shorter on average by the equivalent of at least one decade of additional aging compared to low stress women.” That’s another decade of life!
What else can I do to help my telomeres?
Is help the right word? Lengthen? I don’t even know at this point…
Exercise 🏃♀️
Exercise has multiple benefits, not to mention reducing oxidative stress. In a 2017 study with men and women from the United States, they looked at the relation between those who exercised in high levels, compared to those who had low or medium levels of exercise. The people who got high levels of exercise had much longer telomeres than those who got medium or low levels of exercise.
Eat healthy 🥗
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Fatima, this is generic advice every article gives!” I know. But hear me out.
It’s great to eat healthy, but if you want to target telomeres head on, what you should be focusing on are antioxidants. Antioxidants are full of flavonoids and carotenoids, which scale down oxidative stress and inflammation. It all relates to stress in the end, doesn’t it?
Telomeres are something that even a slight bit of change can help affect the shortening process. If you eat healthy, exercise regularly, and de-stress now and again, you could live longer. Now excuse me, I’m going to go gouge on some strawberries 🍓.
Fatima
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