Remember when you first started driving and stayed out late – your mom complaining “You’re sending me to an early grave!” Well, we can now quantify how much you actually shortened your mother’s life.
Telomeres are the length of DNA at the end of each chromosome. The longer your telomere length, the younger you are; the shorter the length the older you are – independent of your chronological age. Telomere length is a measure of your true biological age at the cellular level.
An individual’s chronological and cellular age can be very different. The first study to demonstrate accelerated shortening of telomeres was conducted in one of the most dramatic and difficult of stressful environments – in mothers of chronically ill children. Under stress conditions, person’s with shorter telomere length fare significantly more poorly than those with longer telomeres – in fact, showing 3-fold higher mortality for heart disease, and 8-fold higher mortality from infectious disease.
Genes driving aging. Not exactly. Genes interacting with your environment, is more like it. Telomeres from identical twins that had different levels of exercise show that inactive subjects may be 10 years older biologically compared with more active subjects.
What strategies help maintain telomere length? Must be expensive. Right? Wrong. Studies have shown an increase in telomere length of 5% in persons taking multivitamins as compared to those who do not. Many other strategies to reduce oxidative stress appear the most promising. The most promising study to date on the role of lifestyle to slow aging was published in 2008 by Dr. Dean Ornish – he showed that 3-months of comprehensive lifestyle changes including diet, exercise and stress management, increased telomere length.
Anatara was formed with the intention to develop the best risk assessment tools available. How will any person age gracefully? By determining what triggers or stimulates a stress response. All exercise is good for me. All healthy diets are good for me. Right? Wrong. Even for those of us in states of “optimal health”, we have seen marathon runners and world-class athletes die prematurely and patients following diets that are healthy for others, suffer and do very poorly.
Based on Anatara’s assessments, we can predict whether the raw food diet you’ve chosen; the marathon training you’re doing, is right for you – whether these lifestyle choices, which are major undertakings, are going to help you stay younger, or make you age more rapidly on a cellular level.