Garma On Health » Aging

Want Longevity? 5 Alternatives to a Calorie Restricted Diet

Joe Garma — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:40:41 +0000

Baby boomers want to cling to any remnant of youth possible, and calorie restricted diets are a proven way to extend longevity, but very few are willing to do it. (You’d hafta tape my mouth shut and tie my hands.) Until the age-defying pill is invented, here are five suggestions to live a longer and stronger life.

Alternatives to a caloric restricted diet for longevity

IF YOU’RE a Rhesus Monkey you have a chance to live substantially longer than your peers; that is if some scientist has caged you and is feeding you a calorie-restricted diet.

Caloric restriction – where you eat just enough of highly nutritious foods to maintain health, but not one calorie extra – has been a focal point of anti-aging research for decades, long enough to have proven its effectiveness with a creature remarkably similar to we humans, the Rhesus Monkey.

But it’s not all about monkeys. At this point, many studies done over a period of 70 years, and with a diverse range of species, have proven that “caloric restriction remains the most effective natural intervention for increasing longevity”, says Jay Williams, Ph.D., an acclaimed physiologist, medical nutritionist, author and researcher.

Studies on Rhesus Monkeys proves calorie restrictive diets improve longevity

So, given the all time high demand for a plethora of anti-aging products, procedures and gizmos, what percent of the population do you think are on a caloric-restricted diet?

Nearly zero percent.

A quick glance around any shopping mall is not a scientific method, but it will sure enough confirm my zero percent assertion.

Despite that the baby boomer generation is clinging to their quickly vanishing youth, and are willing to spend money on anything suggesting to be an age modifier, virtually no one is substantially reducing their caloric intake for the purpose of prolonging their health and life span.

That’s because it would take a Herculean effort, and is decidedly no fun. We’re talking a 20 to 40 percent reduction in calories.

Yes, besides longevity, there are benefits to the caloric reduction eating system, such as substantial reductions in diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, brain atrophy – and even wrinkles.

However, this is a two-sided coin. There are issues with such a diet, such as the potential for musculoskeletal losses, insufficient calories and amino acids (protein) for exercise, adverse effects for pregnant women, and more, which you can examine at Wikipedia’s exposition on the topic.

An Alternative to Caloric Restriction

In my view, and in my life, the caloric-restriction diet does not give sufficient benefits to outweigh the risks, plus the desire to maximize the joie de vivre of my life. Although Epicurus might judge my habits to be too merry-less, I concur with Dr. Williams’ suggestions for some eating behaviors that are safer, more enjoyable and sure to help with longevity and health.

Here are Dr. Williams’ four suggestions for a long and strong life — sprinkled, of course, with my expositions – with the addition of one of mine, number 5:

1. Don’t Overeat. The most important factor in your daily eating habits is to ensure you never eat to, or past, the point of fullness. The long-lived Japanese on Okinawa have a term for this: Hara hachi bu! – eat until 80 percent full. Although you may not feel full at the 80 percent mark, about twenty minutes after you put the fork down, you may be. It takes about this amount of time for the stomach to signal the hypothalamus in the brain that no more food is required.

2. Eat Nutritionally Dense Food. Focus on eating smaller meals with a lower caloric density and high nutrient density. Think plant-based diet, rich in vegetables and whole grains. Read my Diet 101 and 86 Year-olds Recipe for Longevity.

Eat fresh, nutrient dense foods

3. Know The Ingredients. Avoid eating meals with too many unknown ingredients. Often restaurants add excess oils and ingredients that make a seemingly healthy meal much higher in calories than you’d expect.

4. Exercise Aerobically. Aerobic exercise (the type that builds endurance) is an effective way to improve the production of certain sirtuins. Although you don’t need to be so aerobically devoted to benefit by sirtuin production, a 2010 study on marathon runners displayed a significant increase in sirtuin production post marathon.

And now to my added suggestion, number 5:

5. Exercise Anaerobically. Anaerobic exercise (the type that builds muscle) is now known to help cells maintain their DNA during successive cell division and to amp the production of a protein that slows the aging process. For more on this, read: How Exercise Slows the Aging Process and New Research – Muscles = Longevity.

So, What are Sirtuins?

Sirtuins are proteins that are involved with the regulation of both metabolism and stress homeostasis, and are linked to longer life spans in a range of species from yeast to mice.

Seven forms of sirtuins have been located in humans and have been identified in playing key roles in energy homeostasis in metabolic tissues that are important for longevity.

How do you make more sirtuins? You can either reduce your calories by 20 to 40 percent, or as Dr. Williams puts it:

“Maintaining a healthy energy balance of calories in and out through conscious eating and exercise not only aid in sirtuin mechanisms and metabolism maintenance, but also prevent the deterioration of physiological fitness during the process of aging including oxidative damage, inflammation and lack of protein turnover. These factors are what contribute to our disease susceptibility and our overall aging as well.”

The Bottom Line

What you eat, how much you eat, along with persistent physical activity are the most effective way to age gracefully and live longer.

Someday there may be a pill for longevity, but if you want to live to see that day, better eat better, eat less and exercise more.

Yep.

P.S. Read more specifics about Dr. Williams views on this topic in her post: Restricting Calories to Live Longer: Does it Work?.

Why It’s Critical that You Muscle Up as You Age

Joe Garma — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 08:11:54 +0000

The Biggest Loser Nutritionist, Cheryl Forberg takes you through the reasons why building and maintaining muscle at any age is critical to living a long and vital life. There’s three ways that muscles relate to aging well, and three factors that make us lose muscle as we age.

HERE’S A SHOUT-OUT to Cheryl Forberg RD, Nutritionist for NBC’s The Biggest Loser, for her article Why Strong (Muscle Mass) is Sexy, because people need to know that retaining/building muscle and strength is a vital part to aging well.

Without adequate muscle, living long and strong, as I like to say, is less probable.

Ms. Forberg posits the question: “What do muscle mass and strength have to do with how well we age?” The answer touches on three things: 1. Activity level, 2. Metabolism, and 3. Fat.

Now before I get into these three, here’s why you should care about your level of muscle and strength even if you’re still young age. Right now you may be under 30, but someday hopefully you’ll be over 30, and after you reach 30, three to eight percent of your muscle mass erodes each decade. By the time you reach 60 years of age, the muscle loss accelerates.

If you’re not doing resistance training to slow down or maintain muscle mass, you’re heading for a sessile, constrained, slow-moving, injury prone, lackluster middle age and beyond.

So, listen up… here are the three ways muscle/strength relates to how well we age:

1. Activity Level

Remember all the running around (literally) you did as a whippersnapper? All the sports and activities you enjoyed? This movement required muscle. If you don’t maintain it as you grow older, shifting from side to side on your couch will be an Olympian effort. And as you know, the less you do, the less muscle you need to do it; unexercised, unloved, it just fades away.

One other point for those of you concerned about bone density… the strength of your muscles is related to the strength of your bones, and most any activity is going to be done better if your bones are strong.

Ms. Forberg points out:

“Women are likely more focused on keeping their bones dense and strong than on maintaining their muscles, because the medical establishment, society and the media have put more focus on preventing osteoporosis. However, when your muscles are weak, your bones are more likely to be weak.”

2. Metabolism

Muscle burns calories. Just sitting there, doing nada, muscle consumes more of the calories you pile into your body than would otherwise be used. If you ate less as your muscles atrophied, perhaps it would all equal out. But you don’t, or speaking for myself, I don’t, and so muscle-building is maintained as my life-long discipline.

3. Fat

Surely, when metabolism level declines, all other things being equal – like the number of calories consumed – fat happens. But the body is a complicated thing where nothing happens by itself or in isolation, and so it’s not just a slower metabolism that contributes to making us fatter as we get older and our ignored muscles vacate the premises. Insulin does us in as well.

The insulin effect happens this way… Muscles consume glucose (blood sugar) big time, but glucose needs insulin in order to enter cells and be used as energy. If your muscle mass erodes but the amount of blood sugar stays the same, there’s less capacity to use it and you become insulin resistant. This puts you at greater risk for Type 2 diabetes, which in turn raises your risk of heart disease, stroke and, perhaps, Alzheimer’s.

Maintaining Muscle

The good news is that declining muscle isn’t just an unpreventable fact of aging. Declining muscle is merely a result of you no longer challenging your muscles. What you don’t use, you lose.

No excuses – even people in their 90s can show impressive strength gains with exercise.

Again, Ms. Forberg:

“As you age, a number of changes occur in your skeletal muscles, which are the ones that move your arms, your legs and the rest of your body. You lose muscle mass — you simply have less of the stuff. Your nervous system becomes less efficient at prompting your muscles to move. Fat and connective tissue start developing within your muscles, leaving less muscle tissue to contract to move your body.”

We touched on the three ways muscle and strength relate to aging. Now, here are three factors that contribute to declining muscles as the years unfold:

1. Lack of Use

Young, old or in between, if you don’t use your muscle, you’ll lose it. Surely you’ve noted what studies demonstrate: even young people’s muscle mass and strength quickly deteriorate when confined to bed rest.

Building or maintaining muscle requires resistance training. To keep your legs strong (bone and muscle), you don’t have to load a barbell with weights and squat yourself to a hernia. Rather, walk hills, and/or just squat with your hands out in front of you or on your hips.

To keep your upper body strong (bone and muscle), you don’t have to join a gym, lie on a bench and lift a barbell off your chest. Rather, do push-ups. If you can’t do any or many with your legs straight behind you and balanced on your hands and feet, then balance between hands and knees. (Just don’t let your mid section slump so that your pelvis hits the floor first, or let your head droop so low that your nose touches the floor whilst your chest is still 12 inches above it.)

[Watch my rather entertaining, if embarrassing, attempt to demonstrate how to get a full body resistance and aerobic workout at home without any equipment here at the Homestead Workout.]

2. Insufficient Protein

The current RDA (Recommended Daily Allowance) for protein — the amount that people are supposed to get each day — is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight for adults. So if you weigh 200 pounds (91 kilograms), you need 73 grams of protein daily.

How to get it? I recommend you do it the way I do… fish, some diary, eggs and protein supplementation, such as whey protein. (See Diet 101.)

The “Biggest Loser” plan strives for getting 30 percent of your daily calories from lean protein 45 percent from complex carbs and 25 percent from good (omega-3) fats.

3. Hormonal Changes

The ladies on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) may know firsthand that extra estrogen can cause a weight gain in fat, not muscle. It’s certainly in your best interest to discuss the estrogen and progesterone balance of your HRT with your doctor. Review with him/her a good exercise routine, and if you’re an exercise neophyte, do yourself a favor and begin your exercise life under the guidance of a personal trainer. A good one is truly worth it.

Well, that’s it… the bottom line: Muscle does a body good!

7 Ways Meditation Builds Your Brain

Joe Garma — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 22:32:20 +0000

Meditation delivers better health, emotional resiliency and brain power. All you have to do is… to do it a bit each day. The science is clear – -meditation builds a better you. Here are seven benefits of meditation.

MY BUDDY, Steve, is a peripatetic searcher for knowledge, particularly self-knowledge. He has boundless energy, few preconceptions that he’s unwilling to challenge, punches through fears, and over the last few years has done what the cartoonist Stine made popular with his greeting cards — Steve is willing to “look in to find out.”

We’re talking live-in workshop retreats and various deep dive psychotherapies. And now, Steve has added meditation to the list. He recently learned Transcendental Meditation, and now sits daily and relaxes into the vibe.

“It’s making a difference”, Steve announced to me at our café hangout last weekend. I looked up from the section of Sunday’s New York Times that he gave me to give him an inquiring look. I said nothing but wondered how he could pin point the benefits of meditation given all the other modalities in which he’s immersed.

He punctuated the pause with a smirk, and we both returned to our respective reads. It doesn’t matter that we didn’t dive into how meditation is affecting Steve, for we both know.

I’ve been an on and off meditator for 30 years. It’s value is obvious to me. And now with all the gadgets available to measure brain activity, scientists are learning just what’s going on. Here are some…

Seven Benefits of Meditation

1. A more plastic brain. This is a strange term, but it’s nearly literal because consistent meditation leads to what’s referred to as neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to respond to certain inputs by changing itself structurally and functionally. Now, there are even methods presented online that studies show can improve your brains, such as the games developed by Lumosity. That the brain is actually “plastic” – can change – is a big deal, as scientists formerly believed that the brain essentially stopped changing after adulthood.

2. A thicker brain. Get a thicker brain in just 40 minutes a day! A 2005 study on American men and women who meditated a mere 40 minutes a day showed that they had thicker cortical walls than non-meditators. Thicker biceps, yes, but why would you want a thicker brain? Well, a thicker brain results in a brain that’s aging at a slower rate, better decision making, attention and memory. Thick brains are better than thick biceps after all.

3. A more alert brain. In a 2006 study, college students were asked to either sleep, meditate or watch TV. They were then tested on their alertness by being asked to hit a button every time a light flashed on a screen. By a significant 10%, the meditators did better than the nappers and TV watchers .

4. A more relaxed brain. Do you have high blood pressure? In 2008, Dr. Randy Zusman, a doctor at the Massachusetts General Hospital, asked patients suffering from high blood pressure, but not on medication, to try a meditation-based relaxation program for three months. After meditating regularly for three months, 40 of the 60 patients showed significant drops in blood pressure levels . The reason? Relaxation results in the formation of nitric oxide which opens up your blood vessels.

5. A longer-lived brain. Telomeres — the protective caps at the end of our chromosomes — are the new frontier of anti-aging science. (Watch Nobel prize winner Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn tell you about telomeres in Three Months to Longer Life. ) Having longer telomeres mean that you’re likely to live longer. Research done by the University of California, Davis’ Shamatha Project has shown that meditators have significantly higher telomerase activity that non-meditators. Telomerase is the enzyme that helps build telomeres. When telomerase activity shifts into high gear, it can translate into stronger and longer telomeres .

6. A more resilient brain. Meaning, a better immune system. A 2008 study on HIV positive patients found that, after an eight-week meditation course, patients who’d meditated showed no decline in lymphocyte content compared with non-meditators who showed significant reduction in lymphocytes. Lymphocytes or white blood cells are the “brain” of the body’s immune system, and are particularly important for HIV positive people. The study also found that lymphocyte levels actually went up with each meditation session.

7. A pain-free brain. Well, the brain itself doesn’t actually feel pain, but it does command how you feel it. Earlier this year, a study conducted by Wake Forest Baptist University found that meditation could reduce pain intensity by 40 percent and pain unpleasantness by 57 percent. Pretty impressive given that morphine and other pain-relieving drugs typically show a pain reduction of only 25 percent.

There’s some more information for each of these seven at the original article that inspired this summary, so if interested, go take a read here.

Five Diet and Exercise Myths that Need to Die

Joe Garma — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 21:07:13 +0000

The indefatigable Dr. Mercola recently wrote an article entitled 10 Exercise and Diet Myths that Won’t Go Away, that I want to share with you.

I’ll present the list with a brief commentary. If interested, I suggest going to Dr. Mercola’s original article for the details.

Myth #1: Long Cardio Workouts are the Key to Weight Loss

More effective than long, sustained cardio-focused workouts are shorter, more intense exercises. For instance, rather than jogging on the treadmill at a nine minute per mile pace for your entire ½ hour cardio workout, use the treadmill for 20 minutes and breakup your constant pace with a minute or more of fast running.

Myth #2: Diet and Exercise are Equal When it Comes to Losing Weight

Diet is three times more important than exercise when it comes to losing weight. This is observable. Look around at your fellow gym members who have been there forever, work out hard, may even have big muscles, but they’re covered in a fine, thick layer of fat.

The first thing to expunge from your diet should be fructose. Fructose is hidden in virtually every processed food and tricks your body into gaining weight by confusing your metabolism as it turns off your body’s appetite-control system.

Myth #3: It Doesn’t Matter What Time of Day You Exercise

Dr. Mercola opines that although any time you exercise is better than not exercising at all, the best time to exercise is in the morning. I’ve read studies that suggest that the best time to exercise is generally unique to each individual. For me it might be the early evening… for you, the morning.

The issue here is that finding out the best time to exercise is not easily determined without a lot of trial and error. Thus, the best time for you should be the time of day you’re ready, willing and able to exercise.

Myth #4: Diet Foods Will Help You Lose Weight

If by diet food, you mean artificially designed low-fat food, forget about it! Garbage like Splenda and aspartame may have zero calories, but your body receives this “sweet” taste, it expects calories to follow, and when this doesn’t occur it leads to distortions in your biochemistry that may actually lead to weight gain.

Myth #5: You’re Destined to Gain Weight as You Get Older

This is not destiny, but habit. As most of us age, we become less active. Two things then gradually happen over the years: 1. We lose muscle mass, and 2. We add fat.

Your body will naturally lose muscle mass after 40 years of age unless you actively perform the exercises that retain, or grow muscle – resistance training, such as calisthenics or weight lifting. As the lean muscle tissue is lost, the body burns less calories that are required to feed the muscle; however, most of us don’t reduce the amount of calories that we eat. The result – less muscle and more fat.

My body is a 1956 vintage and I have not gotten (much — ha!) fatter or lost muscle mass, so I know it’s not inevitable. I regularly exercise, particularly doing resistance training, and I eat healthily. To learn more about my diet, check out my post, Diet, Food and Nutrition.

Yoga for (red) Wine Lovers

Joe Garma — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 04:06:05 +0000

You’ll grin ear-to-ear while watching this short video animation of a very advanced yoga master doing “his” red wine drinking asanas. Indeed, it’s yoga for (red) wine lovers.

THERE ARE many wine lovers out there, some of whom prefer red wine. And there are plenty of yoga practitioners, some of whom may prefer red wine too.

Let’s get together! Have fun watching this video…

… Oh, but first do realize that one glass of red wine in the evening may actually be healthy, but much more than that and the damage the alcohol does overwhelms any health benefits… and…

…Know too that resveratrol supplementation exponentially supersedes the benefits of red wine as they relate to antioxidant function and longevity enhancement which you can read in this post:

Watch: Aging.. Let’s Slow it Down (with Barbara Walters)

And now that I got that off my chest, do thoroughly enjoy the red wine yoga master video, courtesy of www.haroldsplanet.com.

How to Live to 100. Watch.

Joe Garma — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 22:07:04 +0000

Telomeres are bits of genetic material at the end of your chromosomes that are a marker for longevity. If short, it indicates a short life; if long, a long life. But telomere length not fixed. Your behavior matters.

THERE ARE about 70,000 centenarians living in the U.S. today. Will you become one of them some day? Could be, as scientists claim that the first person to live to 150 has already been born!

The science of longevity is focusing on telomeres which serve as a biomarker, a predictor of how long a person is likely to live. Currently, the test is not particularly accurate, but if you’re anxious about it, or need a kick in the pants to start adopting behaviors that can lengthen telomeres and your lifespan, you can get a test for about $290. (Watch the video below.)

Not surprisingly, exercise and diet can lengthen your lifespan and the quality of life along the way. More on that in these two posts:

How Exercise Slows the Aging Process

Three Months to a Longer Life

Watch this video to learn how telomeres predict lifespan and how they can be lengthened.

Four Ways to Build a Better Brain

Joe Garma — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 18:47:09 +0000

LAST NIGHT I was flipping through some old magazines that I saved in case I ever made the time to read them. Last night, had the time and inclination. And the article I’d like to share with you is from a January 2011 edition of Newsweek.

The title: “Grow Your Mind… the truth about how to boost your brain’s performance”. The startling conclusion – even for an avid exerciser like me – I’ve already suggested: exercise improves the brain more than various brain games and cognitive skill exercisers (along with one other thing, #4 below). This fact is particularly important to those middle aged and beyond.

Neuroscientists admit that they know little about the mechanisms of cognition. They don’t know much about why one brain is smart and the other… well, not so. They simply do not know the mechanism of cognitive enhancement.

What neuroscientists do know is that greater cognitive capacity occurs from having more neurons or synapses, higher levels of neurogenesis, and increased production of compounds, such as BDNF (brain-derived neurotropic factor), which stimulates the production of neurons and synapses.

All that stuff in the above paragraph boost learning, memory, reasoning and creativity – all the stuff you and your brain would be happy to have more of.

Want to improve your brain function?

Do this, particularly numbers 3 and 4:

Learn new, difficult things, like a language. Doing this necessitates the creation of new brain “circuits”, and the more of them you have and the more often you use them, the stronger your brain gets.
Focus and train. This is part of #1 above, for you can’t do something like learn new, difficult things without focusing and training.
Exercise. Along with #4 below, exercise is one of two activities that does more than benefit the specific task at hand… in other words, the cognitive capacity increased by exercise transfers to other things, does generalize to other tasks. Note this: a year of exercise can give a 70-year old the neuron connectivity of a 30-year old, improving memory, planning, dealing with ambiguity, and multitasking.
Meditation. This is the second activity, along with exercise, that studies have found increases a brain’s overall capacity that transfers to new cognitive tasks. Meditation builds focus, and such focus results in enhancing mental agility and attention.

All this is personally good to know, for I have consistently exercised and almost-consistently meditated throughout my adult life. So, some day I expect to wake up smarter. Hope springs eternal.

Go read more about this in the Newsweek article, Grow Your Mind.

Sunscreen Lotions that Work – Know Your Sunscreen

Joe Garma — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 17:22:23 +0000

New FDA Guidelines are forthcoming that will help consumers spot sunscreen effectiveness. Right now, labels are misguided, leaving you to choose lotions that may be ineffective. With skin cancer on the rise, it pays to know how to protect yourself.

CONFUSED ABOUT whether or not to use sunscreen, or which one works? The FDA has announced new mandates that reflect more than three decades of study. By the summer of 2010, changes to sunscreen labels will be enforced.

These lotions will have to indicate if they protect against UVA and UVB radiation; currently, the label only needs to refer to UVB. If both UVA and UVB protection is not offered by 2010, the manufacturer cannot assert that their lotion protects against skin cancer or early skin aging.

What’s more, the new regulations will mandate that sunscreen lotions will no longer be able to advertise a SPF – sun protection factor – greater than 50.

Judy Woodruff of the PBS Newshour (the best news show on TV in my humble opinion), recently interviewed Dr. Ali Hendi, a dermatologist with The Skin Cancer Foundation.

Here’s some bottom line assertions that Dr. Hendi made in the interview:

- With the new guidelines, a product cannot label itself as being waterproof or a sunblock. Those do not exist. There’s no ingredient that is a total sunblock. And there’s no product that is waterproof.

- When outdoors, apply sunscreen every two hours. If swimming or sweating, apply sunscreen after the activity is finished.

- UVB rays do not penetrate deeply; they can be blocked by the glass in your car, for example. UVA rays penetrate deeply and are known to cause skin cancer. It’s important to have protection from both UVA and UVB.

- Skin cancer and skin damage from sun exposure is happening to more young people today than in the past. Oftentimes, the damage is from exposure a decade earlier. Young women are developing skin cancer in greater numbers than men which is thought to be due to their greater use of tanning beds that use U.V. radiation, a known carcinogen.

If you’re a sun lover, or want to know more about this topic, listen to the Judy Woodruff Interview or go to the PBS Newshour and watch the interview here.

Three Months to Longer Life

Joe Garma — Wed, 25 May 2011 20:43:01 +0000

It’s all about telomeres, that DNA on the tips of chromosomes. Telomere length is the marker for longevity – the shorter they become, the shorter your life. Good news is – you can protect and even extend them, and thus, your life.

IT’S NOT a common term in the public sphere, but it won’t be long before everyone has heard about telomeres and knows that they are a biological marker for longevity.

Before I describe what Telomeres are, let’s entertain a short biology lesson.

We all start out as a single cell which then divides an extraordinary number of times to form what you observe in the mirror subsequent to an estimated ten trillion divisions. In each cell nucleus there are chromosomes, which carry the genetic information that comprises you. If your chromosomes shrank every time a cell divided, after a few trillion repetitions, any functioning genes located near the ends of the chromosomes would be lost, and there wouldn’t be much genetic material to pass off to your offspring.

So, why aren’t the chromosomes diminished into oblivion?

The answer: Telomeres, because Telomeres are the short DNA sequences on the end of chromosomes that protect them. They can repeatedly do this due to an enzyme called telomerase which can extend the repeating telomere sequence.

Problem is that telomerase is absent from most adult cells, so a bit of the telomere sequence is lost every time a cell divides. Once its telomeres become too short, a cell loses its ability to divide and either ages or self-destructs.

(For those with the interest, you can read and step yourself through an animation that explains telomeres, and if video is more compelling, Nobel winner Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn presents to a Google audience everything you never knew you didn’t know about telomeres, which you can watch at the bottom of this post.)

Now that you know something about telomeres, let’s address how you can protect, or even extend the length of yours. For this, we turn to a study conducted by renown heart disease researcher and medical doctor, whose office is just down the street from my home, Dr. Dean Ornish.

First, know that the easiest way to extend telomere length is by increasing the activity of the enzyme telomerase.

Dean Ornish’s study took 30 men and put them on the typical Ornish program that he effectively employs to reverse heart disease:

A diet rich in fruits, vegetables whole grains, legumes & soy.
Fat content of their diet limited to 10% of the total calories.
Minimal refined sugars.
Vitamin supplements and fish oil.
Moderate exercise – 30 minutes a day. (Read How Exercise Slows the Aging Process.)
An hour of a daily stress reducing activity, like meditation or yoga.

(More about the Ornish diet.)

Here were the results:

After the three month program, blood levels of the participants’ enzyme telomerase were 29% higher than when they began, and 24 out of 30 men showed significant increases in their telomerase levels.

That’s stunning!

As we get older, there’s a growing desire to find the fountain of youth. We hope that some special supplemental vitamin or drug will do the trick, thus relying on the scientific genius and efforts of someone else. And yet, this capability is right within our own grasp.

I tell you this – it won’t elude my grip.

Now settle back and let a Nobel prize winner show you how to live longer: