Look younger, be healthier, and live longer....

Today's Post: Thursday, 1-13-2011

Believe it or not, there are FIVE ways to do that triple of desirable things.

Here are three you likely already know about if you have been reading our posts or because they are simply better known.

1. Lose excess fat if you have it -- or avoid getting it if you don’t.

2. Get regular exercise every week, particularly vigorous exercise -- and keep doing it.

3. Completely avoid tobacco smoke -- both smoking and second hand smoke.

4. Yesterday we posted on the fact that people who eat lots of vegetables with carotenes wind up with higher blood levels of alpha carotene. Research recently found they are much less likely to die from any cause and have better health -- including being far less likely to get cancer or die from any cancers they do get.

We also covered how many other carotenes in these vegetables help too and some tips on which vegetables these are and how to add more to your food and drink.

5. Today we post on ways to keep your telomeres from getting shorter or which even restore them and make them a bit longer.

In fact staying trim, getting regular exercise, and eating lots of vegetables with carotenes likely each has this effect. And, exposure to tobacco smoke almost certainly shortens your telomeres.

(If you are unaware, here are what telomeres are and how keeping them long tends to prevent or slow aging. Aging happens when your body begins to make imperfect copies of your cells. Eventually you get cells that don’t work and have problems including death. But the DNA in your cells has a kind of shoelace cap or damage preventer at its ends. Those are called telomeres. If they are intact, your body keeps making accurate and properly functioning new cells. So keeping your telomeres long enough prevents aging. And, slowing how fast they get shorter or wear off slows aging.)

Last Tuesday, Al Sears posted on some other things that either cause your body to make more telomerase which makes telomeres longer or prevents them from getting shorter or which have been found to keep telomeres longer in that way and perhaps others.


In a long-term study, Danish researchers discovered that twins who looked younger than their chronological age had better health and longer survival rates than their older-looking twins. Also, the larger the difference in the age they looked to be, the more likely it was that the older-looking twin died first.

They also found that the twins who looked younger had longer telomeres.

Doctor Sears then listed several ways to either boost telomerase or maintain the telomere length in the DNA of your cells.

“One way is to activate telomerase. Telomerase is an enzyme found in all of your cells that tells your telomeres to rebuild themselves. Once activated, telomerase can actually make your cells – and your body – younger.”

In a recent study at the University of California-Davis, found people doing meditation had 33 percent higher telomerase activity in their white blood cells than those who weren’t meditating.

(Most people haven’t got the time to meditate or aren’t good at it. Here are two solutions:

Listen to the guided meditations on audios by Dharma Singh Khalsa, MD which are only 12 minutes long and have different themes to fit what you need most when you do them.

You can also learn Tai Chi which is a kind of slow exercise routine that both gives you the effect of mediation and provides about the same exercise as walking for the time you put in. So if you haven’t time to do both meditation AND get exercise, doing a daily Tai Chi routine can work well.)

Dr Sears then gave an even more time efficient method that also works.:

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that daily supplements of omega-3 significantly increased telomerase activity.

(Eating wild caught fish high in omega 3 oils two or three times a week also works. Two good providers of omega 3 supplements are Nordic Naturals and Carlson. I have been doing both by eating wild caught salmon three times a week and taking omega 3 supplements from Nordic Naturals twice a day.

And I was doing that for the other health benefits of omega 3 before I found it that it may also help keep me younger.)

He then listed more three things that have been found to keep your telomeres long.:

1. A new study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed that people who take a daily multivitamin had younger DNA and had 5.1 percent longer telomeres than non-users.

Dr Sears then noted this:

“When you….buy a multivitamin, stay away from discount store brands … they are inexpensive because those companies buy the cheapest, synthetic ingredients on the international market. This is one area where I don’t recommend cutting corners. Stick with a brand you know and trust.”

2. That American Journal of Clinical Nutrition study was full of good news. It turns out that vitamin B12 supplements increase telomere length.

(To get the full effect of B12 supplements get the kind you can suck on or chew and hold in your mouth a bit. That way you get the B12 directly while older people or people taking anti acid drugs may not get the B12 from digesting it. 500 mcg twice a day or 1,000 mcg once a day works.)

Vitamins C and E also increase the lifespan of cells by preventing telomere shortening.

(2,000 mg of vitamin C in four 500 mg a day works well. And, taking a natural vitamin E supplement of 200 iu a day and eating health OK foods high in the entire vitamin E complex such as walnuts, pecans, almonds, avocados, and extra virgin olive oil will work well.)

3. In another study, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition looked at more than 2,000 women of all ages.

“The more vitamin D they had in their bodies, the longer their telomeres were. On top of that, people who supplemented with vitamin D had longer telomeres than those who didn’t.5

If you’d like to get your vitamin D in a supplement, make sure it’s vitamin D3 (Cholecalciferol). I usually start my patients with 2,000 IUs a day and work up from there if blood levels aren’t responding. Blood levels are helpful to tell you how much you need to take.”

Your body will use at least 3,000 iu a day of vitamin D and other studies indicate that up to 10,000 iu a day is safe while yet others show that the real minimum amount needed for good health is the 2,000 iu a day Dr Sears begins with.

(To put it bluntly, the recent so called guidelines posted saying lower levels of vitamin D are correct was done by researchers who were either not competent enough to know the literature or all the relevant studies OR they were biased.)
Dr Sears also makes the point that the vitamins he lists are all antioxidants.

That would suggest that other antioxidant supplements would help do the job.

And, there is some evidence for that!

Dharma Singh Khalsa, MD said in a recent email that the antioxidant glutathione produced in your body by taking the supplement NAC (n-acetyl cysteine), has been found to maintain telomere length.

And, in another email, Dr Sears himself posted on research showing that taking the far more effective form of CoQ10 called ubiquinol dramatically slows aging.

(Ubiquinol is what your body turns CoQ10 into that actually does the job. It’s been found up to EIGHT times as effective to take it compared to taking CoQ10.)

Ubiquinol is both a strong antioxidant AND it slows aging by keeping the mitochondria in each of your cells delivering energy to them as it should which is also an anti-aging effect.

Best of all, just like omega 3 supplements and foods, each of these supplements has abundant OTHER health benefits that keep you healthy in other ways.