is a fascinating look at why all those things you know are good for you actually are good for you: A healthy diet, positive attitude, exercise, good stress management, rewarding friendships and life goals.
It is no surprise to see these things recommended but I never knew the exact mechanism by which these elements help us live long and healthy lives.
We all know we should avoid stress, isolation, processed foods, smoking and pesticides, and a sedentary lifestyle, This book beaks it down to a cellular level and links all of these factors to telomere length/damage which is then lined to early onset of aging, disease and even death.
There are some really great, easy to follow tips to support your telomeres and be healthier in general, I was pretty shocked by how effective meditation is in keeping your telomeres healthy, Ive always kind of rolled my eyes at meditation but now m going to have to seriously look into doing it because the effects are profound, This isnt just some new age hokum, There is real science to back it up!
Several years ago I contracted Lyme disease, At the time I was a graduate student and under a ton of stress, Instead of fighting it off like it was the flu and moving on as most people do, in me it was much more serious and caused my brain to swell.
Ive always connected the fact that I was under intense stress with the severity of my illness but I never understood the exact mechanism, Now I can see that that period of high stress caused havoc on my telomeres and made my immune system much less effective than it should have been.
I likely lost telomere length and years off of my life too! My focus now will be on protecting my telomeres and doing everything I can to keep what length I have left.
For me, the most striking idea was about passing down a cellular legacy through the generations, If someone is socially disadvantaged they have shorter telomeres which are then passed on to their babies in the womb, These babies with short telomeres become adults who have babies with even shorter telomeres, effectively passing the genetic legacy of poverty down through the generation, which each generation having shorter telomere and therefore more likely to face a serious illness and early death.
This is just horrifying to me, It seems like an endless cycle and that people have no way to break out, Not only do you suffer from social disadvantage but your children will be genetically at a disadvantage to their peers right from the womb! Like there isnt enough stress on pregnant mothers but now they also have to worry about harming their unborn babys telomeres.
Of course they cant worry too much because stress shortens telomeres too! Its not quite that dire but if I were pregnant I would be very concerned about this.
I would want my baby to have every advantage in life, including long, healthy telomeres, This underscores the importance of supporting pregnant women in every way we can to ensure that the human species will be healthy in the future,
I found the science in this book fairly easy to understand, I have some background in genetics and was a teaching assistant for a course in population genetics so I'm not new to any of the terminology or the basic concepts.
I think this might be a bit intense for those who don't even have a basic knowledge of chromosomes but there are lots of helpful pictures to guide you through.
I received this book for free through a Goodreads Firstreads giveaway but this has not influenced my review in any way,
I'm surprised by some of the negative reviews here,
I will admit that the book is repetitive at times, and it does seem as if the impact of stress on telomere length gets more air time than it deserves, but I chalked this up to one of the two authors having a specialty in the field of psychology.
I also can understand why the conclusions are described by some reviewers as anticlimactic, Once again, we're being told to exercise, eat whole foods, get adequate sleep and destress, Ah, duh.
But, I think the strength of this book and the research is that while we've long accepted that exercise, eating whole foods, sleeping and destressing are good for us, we are only now starting to explore and understand the underlying physiologic reasons why.
And anything that deepens our understanding is useful, I honestly don't know what people expect when they read a book like this To learn that exercise, whole foods, sleep and stress management aren't good for us after all Or maybe they are hoping for a magic pill.
. . which is kind of the point, Magic pills don't exist.
Interestingly, despite an everygrowing multibillion dollar health and wellness industry we've never been sicker or fatter, which may be in part due to the fact that the emphasis sometimes misguided and sometimes on point has been primarily on food and exercise.
The role of sleep and stress is mentioned but almost as an aside, Yet books like this suggest that the latter as important, maybe even more important, and the telomere effect may be one explanation why,
In a nutshell, telomeres are a noncoding form of DNA that protects our chromosomes the DNA/genes in our cells, Over time, the telomeres shorten to a point where they can no longer do their job, The result is cellular death and ultimately aging and disease, Research has identified various factors that impact telomere length, A large part of the discussion focuses on stress,
In the end, the research on telomeres only further strengthens what we already know: exercise, whole foods, sleep and stress management are all good for us.
Surprise, surprise. But more importantly, it deepens our understanding of why those recommendations are valid and important, Many antiaging, healthy living books share the same general advice: eat well, exercise, do less dumb harmful stuff, This book specifies the advice with written exercises and habit forming activities, and chooses its advice specifically from telemere verified research,
Blackmore received the Nobel Prize in Medicine infor her research into telomeres, and into telomerase on slowing aging, This comprehensive review of telomere research shows along with articles in Sciences and leading journals that she is still in the lead of her field, so we can trust that the often common sense advice she gives is scientifically rigorous.
The first half of the book explains telomeres at an adequate level of detail, and describes how their length both correlates with health or disease, and explains causative biology pathways for how short telomeres operate on creating disease.
This is apublished book, and much of the citations are for very recent research, since it is only afterthat telomeres have been identified as a key mechanism by which toxic habits and thoughts lead to a shorter healthspan!
The second half of the book, after a scientifically validated selfscored telomere length estimation survey, lays out an organized set of lifestyle interventions, a nicely clear path to protecting your telomere length, and repeats the benefits of doing so.
The advice is both specific to telomere benefits, and written very actionably a reader can immediately commit to specific behaviors and habits which will empirically improve his or her health span.
One example how up to date and correct this volume is: the diet section intensely focuses on reducing sugar / glycemic index, which has become a clear consensus only in the lastoryears.
Encouraging and invigorating, Crafted with meticulous care and attention to detail, Informative and an engaging pleasure to read, Pagespresent a new, innovative, cogent, concise method for reliably changing habits Im a psych major and deep into this literature, yet it is one of the best Ive come across.
One popular comment dismisses the practicality of the advice, by belittling the questionnaire as saying care givers, people of color or hard working office people are just destined to die.
Thats exactly backwards! Blackmore humorously quotes “aging is mind over matter if you dont mind, it doesnt matter, ” so the emotional and biopsychological reaction to the reality is what matters most for telomeres, No matter your life circumstances, the advice is useable and practical, On pageis clearest distinction between the life events and the emotional attitude or interpretation of those events, and it is the later only that effects telomeres.
The epigenetic aspects of telomeres over generations are uniquely meaningful, Mothers and fathers, less pass down the current length of their telomeres to kids, so society has a distinct reason to protect the health of unborn kids by removing stresses from pregnant women, as those stress are highly unequal by region, income, race, age and education.
Why doesnt the book list chemical or pharmaceutical methods for just lengthening ones telomeres, especially since therapies exist for the oneinamillion people who have genetic mutations that mandate early short telomeres and therefore lead to early deaths Because too much telomerase causes cancer, and all the research studies around this are still pending.
Ironically, longer telomeres can be indicative of active cancer, and more telomerase can suggest frantic body effort to repair shortened telomeres this greatly complicates research, and requires attending to the tissue sources of the measured outcome.
In summary, let's just keep ourselves maximally healthy until the day when a medical treatment for telomere length does become available,
Great quotes herein:
“Ive lived a long life with many troubles, most of which never happened” Mark Twain on anxiety
“Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it.
" Dalai Lama, p
Even if some of the lifestyle advice she gives actually lengthens healthspan by some other mechanism than telomeres, such as reducing inflammation or reducing lysosomes overload, that's okay.
. . there is some correlation happening, and this is another reason telomerase boosting alone will not yield immortality, Tetrahymena doesn't have complex systems to maintain, meh, I expected more telomere science, while most of what I got was just advice that we already know about, don't stress, have a healthy sleep routine, exercise, follow a balanced diet etc.
Honestly what the hell man, I thought I was picking up a book by a Nobel Laureate about their biology research but instead what I got was a book written by some health psychologist pushing the latest advice on being healthy that I'd already heard.
I feel like yeah maybe I should have anticipated it somewhat from the title and branding but it also feels disingenuous to it say it's by the Nobel prize winning biologist.
Or even to list that biologist first when listing the authors,
I also feel like it's quite pathetic how bad a job this book does at justifying why one should aim to have longer telomeres as a goal.
Like just
a while ago I read Lifespan by David Sinclair and then complained how it wasn't focusing enough on the science and this was just so much worse.
The author mentions confounding variables at a point, but seems to neglect the fact that longer telomeres being correlated or useful for predicting certain good health outcomes doesn't indict a casual relationship.
There's like zero effort even made to at least offer up a plausible theory of the underlying dynamics that cause shorter telomeres to lead to the signs of again.
At least Sinclair proposed a clear theory for aging and then made a cohesive argument for it,
This felt like an attempt to repackage advice, much of which is evidence based, in some unified fashion by making nebulous links to their correlation to longer telomeres, but without any justification for why it should matter that that link exists.
It feels like an exercise in branding to create some wellness program with the veneer of science but without doing the work of creating any explanations for why things work a certain way.
Also she named drop Deepak Chopra and that's just going to be a hard no from me,
All I wanted was a book about science and instead I got some god damn therapy, and if I had wanted therapy, I wouldn't have stopped going to therapy.
I want to be like someone please teach psychologists how statistics work, but there was enough hedging in the book that makes me feel like she knows the limitations of the studies and science, which makes it feel like this is an attempt to build a brand and sell book more than an attempt to do science education about the current state of telomere research.
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Elizabeth Blackburn