The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer
Elizabeth Blackburn, Elissa Epel, 2017
Why do some sixty-year-olds look forty, while some forty-year-olds feel sixty? Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn and psychologist Elissa Epel show that the answer lies at the ends of our chromosomes. You will learn how stress, habitual thoughts, sleep, food, and even neighbors shorten or protect telomeres, and what you can change right now.
Who it is for
For anyone living under constant pressure who feels they tire faster than their peers. And for everyone curious about how thoughts, sleep, and surroundings reach every cell in the body.
Your telomeres, it turns out, listen to you. They absorb the instructions you give them.
Two women of the same age at one café table
A cool Saturday morning in San Francisco. Two friends sit at an outdoor café with hot coffee. Kara is always sleepy, catches every cold circulating through the office, and each cold ends in a lingering sinus illness. She reaches cautiously for her cup, as though her neck and shoulders hurt. Her friend Lisa looks fresh, has clear eyes, and enough energy for the entire day. Kara sighs: “We’re the same age, but I look older.”
Chronologically, they are the same age. But inside her cells, Kara is decades older. Her cells age prematurely while Lisa’s keep renewing themselves. What explains this difference? Elizabeth Blackburn received the Nobel Prize for helping uncover part of the answer. Psychologist Elissa Epel spent almost twenty years studying its other half: how a person’s life affects their cells.
The answer is telomeres. Chromosomes, the strands carrying our genes, end in protective tips called telomeres. The authors compare them to the plastic tips on shoelaces: while the tip is intact, the lace does not unravel. Telomeres shorten over the years, and cells begin aging. The book’s central discovery is that the speed of this shortening depends on more than genes. Stress, habitual thoughts, sleep, food, loved ones, and even neighbors influence it.
This book is about extending healthspan and shortening diseasespan, rather than immortality, so that old age can be long, clear-minded, and your own. Six chapters lie ahead: what telomeres are, how stress enters cells, why our response to difficulties matters, which thoughts harm them, what helps the body, and why our cells respond to other people. Let us begin.
The shoelace tip you cannot simply lengthen
Each time a cell divides, it copies its DNA. But the copying process loses a little of the chromosome’s very tip every time. Telomeres are this reserve at the ends: repeated pieces of DNA without genes that take the loss themselves. While the reserve remains, the genes inside stay intact.
In the 1960s, biologist Leonard Hayflick noticed that human cells in a test tube divide around fifty times and then stop forever. They do not die, but they no longer work as before. These cells age internally and release substances that fuel inflammation throughout the body. The authors believe that excessively short telomeres most often trigger this emergency brake. Shortened telomeres are linked to almost all diseases of aging: diabetes, heart and lung disease, weak immunity, and some cancers.
Blackburn began with a tiny freshwater organism called Tetrahymena. Its cells can divide repeatedly without aging. Blackburn’s laboratory observed its telomeres growing and found the enzyme that builds them up. They named it telomerase. Humans have it too, and in healthy cells it patches worn chromosome ends.
The first thought after such a discovery is to make a telomerase pill and stop aging. The authors immediately temper that enthusiasm. Telomerase is overactive in roughly eighty to ninety percent of malignant tumors: it allows cancer cells to divide indefinitely. Too much telomerase is as dangerous as too little. We need precise adjustment in the right cells at the right time, rather than a flood of it.
The body can make these adjustments itself. As it turns out, lifestyle rather than a pill can help it. The authors learned how when they began studying people whose lives were very hard.
About the author
Elizabeth Blackburn is a molecular biologist who received the 2009 Nobel Prize for discovering how telomeres and the enzyme telomerase protect chromosomes. Elissa Epel is a health psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies how stress accelerates aging.
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